Mona Lisa: A Smile Across the Ages

The Mona Lisa speaks for herself in this book from behind the glass of the Louvre in Paris, calling herself a window between the unseen and the present and a smiling mystery that still refuses translation. She wonders whether her smile was joy or sorrow, a promise or a long farewell, and suggests that people sometimes smile because sorrow has grown too deep for tears. She reads the landscape behind her as a lifetime: roads that wind away and never arrive, mountains that are the ribs of memory, a river that is time passing without return, and a mist that is everything we do not know. Looking through the viewer to the child they used to be and the love they left unfinished, she tells of a man who stood before her and saw his own life passing, and says that everyone who sees her creates a different Mona Lisa, so that viewers are still completing the painting. Even if her colors were put out and the museum closed she would remain as an idea, and the book ends with her asking who was the painting, who was the viewer, and which of us was dreaming the other.