![]() ![]() ![]() Through him, almost anything is possible, and anything can have meaning. He is our patron saint of secular spirituality. But the real thrill lies in the idea that around every corner – or in every painting or structure or artifact – are clues to a secret history far richer than the one we think we know. There are others – his potato-chip chapters his hazily mystical combination of history, religion and futurism his gleefully bad bad guys and his ruffled hero, Harvard "symbologist" Robert Langdon. (Perhaps this violin I found is a Stradivarius? Isn't that Harry Houdini's straitjacket?) This is why thousands of people, many of whom hope to have discovered their own notable candy dish, flock to tapings of Antiques Roadshow.Īnd it's also one of the reasons we read Dan Brown. The bowl also tidily contains one of our most romantic cultural obsessions: What seems worthless may be worth something what seems without history may contain far more than we previously knew. The person who sold it had bought it for $3 at a yard sale in 2007. It is actually a rare, thousand-year-old specimen of pottery from the Song dynasty in China. It is an unremarkable bowl in some ways: Only five inches in diameter, to the untrained eye it looks like the kind of vessel that would contain lemon drops on a grandmother's coffee table. Two months ago, a bowl sold at auction for $2,225,000. ![]()
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