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+---
+title: 'Nothing to Be Done'
+date: '2011-01-04T02:02:26-05:00'
+permalink: /nothing-to-be-done/
+tags:
+    - travel
+---
+
+We’re at the airport, on our way back to the US. Earlier this morning, as we were checking out of the hotel, I took one last look around the reception area, which was much emptier than it had been at any previous point during our stay. Past one sitting area, I spotted these two paintings:
+
+<img src="img/IMG_0078.jpg" alt="Hotel lobby painting">
+
+Wow, I thought. Amazingly dramatic faces! Real personality. And such… hopelessness. Odd choice for a hotel lobby.
+
+So I turn the opposite direction, toward the reception desk, and see a matching pair of paintings behind the desk.
+
+<img src="img/IMG_0082.jpg" alt="Hotel lobby painting">
+
+I was trying to be subtle here, and so the bottom quarter of the paintings is lost. But you get the idea: the same bleakness, the same deep character. While the first set of paintings are of equal width, though, the second set are quite different; the painting on the left, of an older man weighed down by suitcases, is much narrower than the one on the right, of a man sitting on a bench. And yet they’re tied together, I slowly realized, by the scarf the man on the left is wearing, which is blowing into the frame of the painting on the right.
+
+But wait. It’s not a scarf. It’s a rope.
+
+It’s… Lucky. And Pozzo. And Didi and Gogo.
+
+How utterly astonishing, to stay in a hotel whose lobby walls are waiting for Godot.
+