"Anything goes," say the doers. "Mainstreet is almost all right," says Venturi, the architect. "Nothing works any more," say those who suffer from the hostility of our day and age. These statements stand for contradictory opinions, if not for contradictory facts. We get used to living with contradictions and there are several reasons for this: traditions crumble, and with them cultural identities. No one seems really to understand and control the dynamics developed by economics and politics. Everything merges into everything else, and mass communication creates an artificial world of signs. Arbitrariness prevails. Postmodern life could be described as a state in which everything beyond our own personal biography seems vague, blurred, and somehow unreal. The world is full of signs and information, which stand for things that no one fully understands because they, too, turn out to be mere signs for other things. The real thing remains hidden. No one ever gets to see it.

Nevertheless, I am convinced that real things do exist, however endangered they may be. There are earth and water, the light of the sun, landscapes and vegetation; and there are objects, made by man. such as machines, tools or musical instruments, which are what they are, which are not mere vehicles for an artistic message, whose presence is self-evident.

When we look at objects or buildings which seem to be at peace within themselves, our perception becomes calm and dulled. The objects we perceive have no message for us, they are simply there. Our perceptive faculties grow quiet, unprejudiced and unacquisi-tive. They reach beyond signs and symbols, they are open, empty. It is as if we could see something on which we cannot focus our consciousness. Here, in this perceptual vacuum, a memory may surface, a memory which seems to issue from the depths of time. Now, our observation of the object embraces a presentiment of the world in all its wholeness, because there is nothing that cannot be understood.

There is a power in the ordinary things of everyday life, Edward Hopper's paintings seem to say. We only have to look at them long enough to see it.