The first stop on Kyoto's Philosopher's Walk is
Ninkaku-ji, a spectacular traditional Zen dry garden. The giant
sand cone isn't supposed to be representative of anything specific,
but the guidebooks feel free to speculate that it's Mount Fuji.
It reminds me more of the shape you get making sand castles, when
you fill your little plastic bucket completely, turn it upside
down and carefully remove it. Only I could never get my cones
so perfect in a million years. Given its popularity with tourists
both domestic and imported, this must be one of the most-photographed
places on the planet. It was like in Don Delillo's White Noise,
the scene with The
Most Photographed Barn In America, when the guy asks the narrator
to imagine what the barn looked like before it was photographed.
What would Susan
Sontag say?
