The utter, total opacity of the past, and in this case the ancient past is a the subject of a NYT article. It was at the 
Louvre, in Paris. 
I did a somewhat brief visit there but there's always that w o w sensation when all the stuff you've seen in books, magazines for years are now on the wall, with you breathing the very molecules of it as it slowly degrades in front of your face. And the Louvre didn't have the kind of security we see over here, you could just walk right up this paintings and look close like. Back in the 90's, as they were digging to make another plaza at the Louvre, they hit rock and ultimately revealed the base of the original fort built in the 900s CE, and I say w o w again! Well, yeah, saw the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, Venus di Milo, blah, blah, but what I really liked was at the Musee d'Orsay. Have you had it with all that pretty Monet?: the lilies, the gardens and oh, the haystacks which we have in spades here at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. Monet painted his turkeys! and they even had them at his restored home too! Just like my dad's Uncle and Aunt in Duluth (well outside of it). That's where I got the only souvenir of the whole trip, a Monet Fondation staff T shirt (black of course). By the way, souvenir is French for memory.
