polis

Shadow puppets fill in the ancient Greek backstory involving a fellow named Thaddeus, who markets water in disposable vases that the polis can’t get enough of.

More than that, a kind of arts polis, a democratic gathering place for arts and ideas.

They also started to create what Václav Benda called a “parallel polis” – a world in which one tried to act as if one was already free.

A stopping place is coming with big buildings—and polis with fierce dogs that can smell even fear.

To put it in terms the ancient Greeks might have used, our “polis” was getting ever larger, the sense of the city that defined “us” against barbarism was becoming more inclusive, capacious and diverse.