"The Last Day of Pompeii is a large history painting by Karl Bryullov produced in 1830–1833..."

"... on the subject of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.... The painting was received to near universal acclaim and made Bryullov the first Russian painter to have an international reputation... Sir Walter Scott is said to have studied the painting for an hour before declaring that it was not an ordinary painting, but an epic.... It was seen there by Edward Bulwer-Lytton whose novel The Last Days of Pompeii was published in 1834.... Ivan Turgenev described the painting as 'the glory of Russia and Italy' and it inspired Alexander Pushkin to write a poem about the destruction of Pompeii.... Gogol opined that it was a 'bright resurrection of painting, which has been for too long in some sort of semi-lethargic state,'  but was not alone in seeing a parallel between Pompeii and contemporary Saint Petersburg and the painting as a forecast of divine retribution for the modern city's decadent Western ways. The dissident Alexander Herzen, meanwhile, saw it as an allegory about the collapse of European monarchies or the tyrannical power of the Russian state over the individual""

I'm quoting a Wikipedia article that I'm reading on the occasion of the news of the destruction of The Georgia Guidestones, the subject of the previous post. The awesome painting shows the toppling of stone structures in the upper left corner and the Guidestones are toppled stone structures....

... but it was not that connection that led me to "The Last Days of Pompeii." It was a point of grammar and a scanning of my own memory in search of a title that contains a plural.

Let me know what the first title with a plural you think of. I'm stuck on "Days," so the next one I think of it "The Days of Wine and Roses"...

... and the third one is "Seven Days in May."

ADDED 2 HOURS LATER: I'm just seeing that the painting title is not in the plural. It's "The Last Day of Pompeii," because, of course, the epic horror happened on one particular day. The plural title I thought of, when I needed a plural title, was "The Last Days of Pompeii," the novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and it was through the Wikipedia page for the novel that I encountered the painting. That slight difference in title wouldn't matter much, but it was the very reason for the blog path I took this morning. And it makes me notice a more general topic, the stationary time of most paintings versus the passage of time that is crucial to nearly every novel. There are interesting exceptions: A painting could be a triptych showing a sequence or it could have segments like a comic strip. And a novel could be frozen in one particular moment — though all I can think of right now is "The Mezzanine" by Nicholson Baker — a book that, ironically, I've been trying for more than 30 years to get to the end of!