A Dance to the Music of Time, by Nicolas Poussin, c. 1635. Wallace Collection, London.
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Miscellany
Along with an elephant whose name in Arabic meant “the father of intelligence,” Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid presented Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne with a mechanical clock powered by water in 807. At noon a weight dropped, bells sounded, and twelve brass horsemen emerged from twelve windows.
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger, 1984
