The muses have all gone on holiday and left Hope in her powder-blue dress to sweep up the pieces of a broken civilization
With summer, a strange peace comes over Rome. One is almost hypnotized in the contemplative heat as the masses drain out towards their proletarian holiday camps by the sea. This is exactly what I came here for; dreams of lounging in a shady corner without movement, only chiaro scuro. When faith has escaped, there it always desire. Now it’s Friday morning 9am in Rome and we are sailing off into the sunset for no good reason other than that it’s the best direction to take in life – maybe someday, someone will look into my eyes and actually believe what they see.
Who can resist this place – languidly drinking in the reds and oranges in Santa Maria della Pace – in the summer heat when a breeze starts to lift the hair from my neck and the mind begins to wander, and who cares what the consequences are. Wouldn’t be so bad just to sink into the stones and forget the good fight entirely, to frequent enoteche and cheese shops, sit in the piazzas smoking and wondering when the next peak of passion will hit. Water rushes on down the Tiber, and what are these kindnesses all about? Did you see what I saw? Viva, viva, viva.
It’s sad to think about, but even if we wanted to go home now, we couldn’t. We’ve been marked by this place and these people. There’s been no important breakthrough, but subtleties have shifted inside us; our hearts have mutated. We can never be what we once were, love what we once loved, have the same dinner conversations. Some part of us has been ripped open to reveal the bloody-red guts festering in the heat. And in the midst of it all there are these hypnotic zen moments when complexity surrenders and the mind comes to peace, when we know deep within our bones the anticipation of what is to come. There is no sense in knowing – one cannot change one’s destiny or shape the future in a meaningful way. You can only prepare yourself for the inevitable.
But under a breezy cloud, all is beautiful and right in my little corner of the fall of civilization this morning. Taxi drivers gesticulate wildly, a girl in a skimpy pink dress gasses up her motorino. At the bus stop, passengers wince at the dusky smell of smoke in the air. Newspapers open, they read about the latest attack of terror. Fear rises that they -- ignorant, innocent Romans -- will be next.
Remember in the depths of winter gray wandering those forgotten streets on the other side of Trastevere, searching blindly for that which we’d heard spoken of so fondly, some lost element just around the next angolo, never really finding it, wishing always for more streets, more narrow alleyways forgotten in the midst of old buildings and old men. Now it looks like summer and the streets are just as quiet, just as mysterious if a bit brighter. The old men still stare wearily up from their politics and the mystery still burns.
Wherever you are right now, there is always another – parallel – existence out there; there are an infinite number of potentials. They come to us in our dreams, fantasies, long drawn-out masochistic melodramas on hot Friday afternoons behind our sterile desks, long road trips back in time after an evening spent fighting traffic, when there are only silhouettes in the darkness out there, whispering another state of being that remains elusive but just won’t fade from sight. The old Italian men survive this way, living long lives over afternoons of coffee and potential energy, tales of possibilities lost and found in the interminable fog. Are these parallel lives any less real than the ones we are living right at this moment? Would we be happier if we were completely blind to them?
But it is the potential of these fantastic worlds, and our surprising intermittent glimpses into them, that eggs us on as we tread the four-lane highway through our dreary days –- sometimes, life is too long. Although we are always alone, these parallel universes interconnect our souls. Sometimes we can reach out through them for imperceptible moments in the meeting of the eyes or sharing of a laugh over the absurdity of it all. If they become our reality for more than an instant, our parallel lives become every bit as banal and overly complex as the one we live every day. Yet in every inspiring glimpse of those infinite other less-travelled paths, one is tempted to believe that life could be richer, happier, more fulfilled –- there is the inspiration to step up and achieve great things, to give up everything and stake it all on the impossible. Desire is faith.
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