Florence, April 10, 1492
Lorenzo de Medici died last night. I left the city before dawn this morning with a satchel of manuscripts and nothing else. I have been pointing east for years without admitting it to myself. Today I admitted it.
I do not have the words yet for what Lorenzo’s death means. He was the city, in the way that certain figures become so completely identified with their moment that the moment cannot easily continue without them. Poliziano wept openly in the corridor outside the bedroom. I did not weep. I have been carrying the weight of this since the Pazzi Conspiracy fourteen years ago, when I understood for the first time that this brilliant, irreplaceable world was held together by human flesh, and human flesh fails.
I was sent to Florence as an orphaned infant in the household of a bishop’s cousin. I am thirty-four years old by the calendar now, and I was in the city for the full formation of something I will not see replicated. The Platonic Academy. The debates with Ficino. The rooms where Pico and Poliziano and men whose names history will not bother to keep were doing something that deserved to last and did not last because everything that deserves to last depends on the survival of the particular people who built it.
I have left the key to my rooms on the table. I am walking out through the Porta San Nicolo as the first light touches the Arno, and I am not looking back. East. That is all I know of where I am going.