In the Louvre   I still remember the letdown — too much to see past. Not just the guards and the scrum, the gawkers and the talkers, the no-touch box and the bulletproof glass and the numbskulls snapping their flash photographs before being escorted outside. All of that, and the dark varnish of time, all those poor reproductions, those gags about what that inscrutable glance might hide . . . and why on earth do so many dimwits come here to ruin the shared experience, to lie to themselves that they know that smile, stood near the Mona Lisa?                          Anyway, that’s how it was decades back. I hear it’s worse now.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont January 2023