12/30 Went to Chania yesterday. Seems like a square on a chess board, politically, with its layers of various cultures, the mosque on the harbor promenade (shaped like a fusion reactor). We look for parking in the old town, J navigating through alleys with only centimeters to spare left and right, and as we do that, we casually pass by an excavation site that stretches some five thousand years back.

It looks eerie, it looks sacred. And yet: all of this is barely six feet below today’s city surface. If the city were removed by decree, you’d find the same everywhere in the area it occupies today. Life was at no time meaningfully different in these narrow streets and small buildings, and it’s just coincidence that one wall was left standing for a thousand years longer than another of the same room, and is now therefore in a different color on the excavation map. The alluring, the sacred part is, just as I realized yesterday about my twenty year bets, to be looking back through time.