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Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit. -Marcel Proust Speaking of conceptual art, there is one artist whose whole work consisted of inscriptions, the late Ian Hamilton Finlay (19252006). Finlay was not a painter or sculptor but a poet-gardener. His greatest work was his garden, Little Sparta, in the Pentland Hills of southern Scotland. It is meaningfully punctuated with stones and signs, sayings and symbols. I visited Little Sparta in 1993 and Ian made me a gift of a small book from his Wild Hawthorn Press, the laboratory for all his ideas. In cultivating Little Sparta, Hamilton reinvented the neoclassical tradition of the garden as a site of contemplation, a place of philosophic and poetic thought. Words happened to be part of the landscape, indeed almost a part of the flora and fauna. My favorite Little Sparta inscription? Stone Pan pipes inscribed with the words: When the winds blow, venerate the sound. Venerate, also, the sight of letters on buildings for their revelatory visual presence: carriers of meaning, insignia of wisdom. The Vatican Museums, in its vast Gallery of Inscriptions, acknowledges and dedicates itself to this notion that words carved in stone, like the Ten Commandments, not only must be heeded, but may be appreciated for the sheer beauty of their formation, the ancient perfection of their letters, so much more than signs. H HYLAND