ABSTRACT
In one of my very earliest classrooms—it must have been at nursery school—hung a large map of the world. In the lower middle part of the map, a big reddish-pink island swam in a blue sea; at both upper corners small reddish-pink shapes hovered like guardian angels on either hand; in the center a large reddish-pink triangle pointed downward from an amorphous and multicolored land mass; and the whole map was satisfyingly unified by patches of ruddy color distributed over a substantial portion of its surface. I did not know then that what I was experiencing was the aesthetics of Empire.
