Constantinople, November 3, 1494
The city has been Ottoman for forty years. The scholars who fled westward after the fall took what they could carry. What they could not carry remained, and what remained is what drew me here: the libraries no one thought to burn because no one knew what they contained.
I have been reading for eleven days without stopping for more than sleep. Greek texts that never made it to Florence. Hermetic material that Ficino would have wept over. Fragments of Neoplatonist commentary in a hand so old the vellum has gone the color of old honey. There are documents here that change what I thought I knew about what the ancient world understood, and I thought I knew a great deal.
The librarian is a small Byzantine man of perhaps sixty who has survived every change of administration by being precisely as invisible as possible. He watches me read with an expression I cannot interpret. This morning he brought me tea without being asked. I thanked him in Greek. He answered in what I believe was Aramaic. I nodded as though I understood. Some conversations are more about the gesture than the content.
Lorenzo is dead. Florence is already different. I left before it could become something I did not recognize. East was the only direction that made sense. The West has been cataloguing its ignorance for centuries and calling it theology. Out here the questions are older and no one pretends the answers are settled.
I could stay in these rooms for a year. I may.