Camera Obscura

We parked in a dusty lot off the hill city of Kastro, a village on the Greek island of Sifnos. We were there to see the Church of the Seven Martyrs, a little chapel sited on a spit of land in the middle of the Aegean. We wound our way down the cliffside along a stone path that led out onto the promontory, wind whipping our hair and clothes. For some reason I kept turning over in my mind the line from T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” about the chapel perilous, “the empty chapel, only the wind home”—the castle where, in Thomas Malory’s rendition of Arthurian legend, Sir Lancelot almost succumbs to a witch. The Seven Martyrs’ remote position out on a rock, the green waves tossing and breaking beneath it, made me think of it as a margin at the end of the world, and lonely and perilous—if beautiful—for that reason.

This was not the first time I’d visited the Church of the Seven Martyrs. My husband and I had traveled to Sifnos in the late 1990s when we were graduate students many, many years earlier, and now here we were again, this time with our children in tow. As we approached the chapel, my husband took my hand with the excitement of this return to a shared past: “Remember?” he prodded me, “how amazed we were the first time we saw this?” We’d rented a moped, apparently, leaving it in town to trace the very path I was now retreading out to the windswept chapel.

But, in fact, I had no memory of that earlier visit. Nothing