No Wonder Why Hannibal Loves Him

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he’s near at hand yet here I stand my heart and mind at war… the times must change the world must change

Details, part I; Claude Paradin: Devises Héroïques, 1551.

Safavid carpet, 16th c. GORGEOUS.

detail Medusa - Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1630s

Dosso Dossi Details

Hunger is obviously a major theme in Hannibal—it’s literally the cannibal show—but the difference in how that’s portrayed with Hannigram is intriguing.

Hannibal was starving for connection before he had Will, and then everything changed for him. As Bedelia tells Will, “Did he daily feel a stab of hunger, and find nourishment at the very sight of you? Yes.” Hannibal’s hunger is sated by so much as the sight of Will. A mere look at him is enough to satisfy him.

But Will is different. Rather than being sated by his connection with Hannibal, it is the very thing that makes him hungry. There’s a frame in the Italy chapter that makes it look like he’s trapped in a starvation cage. In the script for his sailing scene, he’s literally described to look hungry:

Both Hannibal and Will have a possessive, obsessive, all-consuming love for one another, but it affects them quite differently. Hannibal is nourished by the very sight of Will, but for Will, no amount of the profound attention he experiences from Hannibal can fully sate his hunger—it’s a high he can’t help but chase. It fuels his pathological need to return to Hannibal again and again, no matter how self-destructive it is. I think this is why Will is more outwardly possessive of Hannibal than Hannibal is of Will. Hannibal wants Will to be his; Will wants Hannibal to be no one else’s. Both forms of possession, but Will’s is more jealous because of the way he experiences Hannibal’s attention. It’s a high, it’s a hunger—it’s a need, not a want.

T.E. Lawrence once owned a bronze replica of Hypnos, the god of sleep.

In 1909, when he was on his way back from a tour of Syria, T. E. Lawrence passed through Naples and wrote a friend: "The bronzes in the Naples museum are beyond words". He paid a Neapolitan bronze foundry eight francs for a flawed freehand copy of the Hypnos head now in the British Museum (itself a Roman copy of a Greek work dating from the fourth century BC).

He wrote to his brother Will that it was "very good work, but a bad cast, modem naturally. I asked the price and tumbled down with it to eight francs, little more than the value of the metal. You will admire it immensely; and I'll give you five minutes to find out the fault in the casting".

After returning to Oxford he placed it on a seat in the bay window of his study in the garden bungalow, where it became his most cherished ornament. According to Vyvyan Richards, Lawrence would lie on the floor and contemplate it. He wrote that "nothing, not even the dawn–can disturb me in my curtains: only the slow crumblings of the coals in the fire: they get so red & throw such splendid glimmerings on the Hypnos & the brass-work". He also wrote to his brother Arnold: "I would rather possess a fine piece of sculpture than anything in the world".

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They can live in my new world, or they can die in their old one.

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