which is worse, this snobbery or the inverted snobbery of what Paul Virilio calls a ‘pitiless art’? (“Art can rest on sinister foundations,” says Diaghilev in Chinchilla.)
I said, ‘Marco Polo, the hero of the Christian west. This man travelled freely [because of Genghis Khan, its villain] because of the Mongols. He went from outpost to outpost along roads they made safe, where before he would not have gone ten miles without a knife at his throat,