In this detail from the right panel of his truly awesome masterpiece, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," the Flemish master Hieronymus Bosch depicts the doomed and despairing bodies of damned souls passing through the demonic digestive system of an appalling bird-headed creature, then being excreted as the contents of strange bubble turds into a bottomless pit of stinking ordure, a journey not wholly unlike that faced by travelers on Boston's public transportation system. Take the wretched, prideful slattern who lounges at the feet of the bird monster with a toad squatting on her chest, for example, as she gazes into a mirror planted in the buttocks of a grinning demon - surely this scarifying image represents the fate of a tired and dejected commuter staring glumly out of the filthy train window at the drearily relentless conurbation of rat-infested apartment buildings, discount chain stores, empty office blocks, and third-rate colleges he passes during his daily grind back and forth between his so-called "home" and place of work.
Only a genius such as Bosch, rallying all the extensive power of his sublime imagination, could possibly conceive the true medieval nightmare that is the depressing mortal coil we mockingly call "the nine to five."
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If our skin were a painting and we passed each other in a street, on a workday, would I glance over and see a Manet that had been painted over a Bosch? Or would it be the starkness of a Bosch that I'd be hammered with?
Posted by: DarkoV | June 15, 2005 at 16:27
Probably a Thomas Kinkade, more's the pity.
Posted by: stephenesque | June 15, 2005 at 16:48
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