In a letter to Philip Whalen, dated 1957 26 Dec, Gary Snyder wrote:
"All Xmas Eve & Day prowling Byzantium–Hagia Sophia the uttermost and beyond which O of religious interior building. Got drunk in Pera & caught a bus in Chalcedon; touched a marble pillar taken from the temple of Diana at Ephesus; and now at port in Sea of Marmara at Izmit, antiently Nicomedia. I can’t bear it! Snow on the hills about; white spire minarets of isolated mountain Mosques.
GLEAM: wool, bread, mustaches."
(From The Gary Snyder Reader p 153)
I just love what that man sees! And I think I understand precisely what he meant by "I can’t bear it" because it’s what I felt in Istanbul and part of it was a sense of too much history.
ak