-I-
Writing in a journal is a form of obsession. That’s why I don’t do it regularly. Although such a statement carries a ring of finality, of the definite, which is something I’m not sure I feel. Why I don’t keep a diary: Because I’m lazy. Because it makes the muscles in my left hand hurt. Because in the (close to) four decades since I switched from writing longhand to using a computer, the rhythm of my sentences has changed. I used to handwrite twenty-ish words a minute, but now I can type twice that. And so, my thoughts run away from me like wild elephants when I am using a pen, and I am left to corral the ones I can and watch as the others take flight and go.
Why to keep a diary: The improvisation. The not knowing what I’m going to write. The sense of working outside the lines, a narrative that is not a narrative, much in the way of life. I did not know I would begin this entry in this manner until I started, and then I simply followed the line.
In that, it is not unlike breathing, an in and out, an ebb and flow.
Of course, this is not a real diary. Or a journal, which is the word I prefer. It is more a daybook, a set of reflections on a given slice of time. Informed by my knowledge but also by my ignorance, by all the things I understand and also those I assume. This is like life also, since a slice of time is all we have, whether we find that soothing or we do not. Instead of all we have, I almost wrote what we are given, but then, who is doing the giving, I would like to ask? This afternoon, I stood with Rae in Saint Peter’s Square and thought about the gates of hell, the dimensions calculated in the fifteenth century by church scholars based on descriptions in The Divine Comedy—if not a novel, then a work of the imagination, a work of fiction. This, it turns out, may be the Comedy’s longest lasting joke.
Last night, we went to a bar off Piazza Navona, near where we are staying, to meet an acquaintance for a drink. She is native Roman, a writer I’ve known loosely for some years, and she reminded me of our driver from the airport, his Roman self-assurance, the knowing nod, the smile when he said he had lived here all his life. I am not that guy, but I identify with him. How could I not? He reminded me of a New Yorker, the sense of being one: yes, I know this place is tough but it is ours; if you don’t like it, you can go. The sensibility attracts me—it makes the city recognizable. Later, he asked about Los Angeles. I responded by describing the New Yorker cartoon in which two men approach each other in identical drawings: under the one labeled New York, the men are saying fuck you while thinking have a nice day; under Los Angeles, the opposite.
He laughed when I was finished. Bene, bene, he said.
At the bar, I asked about the play of time here, which could become obsessional to me, I think. It is like quicksand, our acquaintance suggested; if you stay too long, you feel yourself sink in. It makes you feel: Why Bother? It makes you feel as if it doesn’t matter if you do something or if you do not. When I mentioned that this was what I thought I might be looking for, she laughed, and then she and Rae began speaking in Italian, and I sat back and sipped my beer and listened to their mellifluous back and forth.
On the way to meet her, we got lost using the app again. I think the problem is the lack of proper street signs. That, and too few traffic lights. The result is a city where you must—in the most literal way imaginable—think on your feet.
Or perhaps this is just my American point of view.
During our visit, yesterday, to the Via Appia Antica and the Catacombs, we passed Roman buildings that had been further built upon during the Middle Ages and have remained inhabited or in use to the present day. You must remember, our guide explained, Rome is like a lasagna. Layered, in other words. We saw this not just in the Catacombs, where the bodies—or tombs—of Christian martyrs and others were layered upon one another, but also on Via Appia, where the paving stones bear ruts cut by Roman supply wagons off to conquer Greece and North Africa, even as Saturday morning cyclists ride it as a trail. The Vatican, we learned, was initially a resting place for bodies—a necropolis, or city of the dead. The Catacombs were different, a way station, where the dead might wait to rise with Christ upon the Second Coming, another myth I reject. The Romans, the guide went on, didn’t believe in the afterlife; this is why they built so many monuments and cenotaphs, since only in public memory does anyone live on.
And this began to feel to me like a revelation. Deep time, if you will, in human form. The constant reinvention of the city, the addition of new structures to the foundations of the old until they themselves become ancient, another way of saying: Nothing ever dies. Or no, not exactly—we all die but maybe it doesn’t make a difference, or as much of one, if what we have created stays in use. This city, first in the world, 2000 years ago, with a million inhabitants, is a testament to that idea.
It reminds me of the Tar Pits, bubbling their eternity hard up against Wilshire Boulevard, although in Los Angeles, America, we don’t imagine it the same. We can’t see around our individuality, our indispensability. And yet, to borrow a phrase from Charles de Gaulle: The cemeteries are full of indispensable men. I wonder if this is why there are no Italian existentialists. Then, I wonder if that is true. Then, I wonder if this is a better way of living, la dolce vita, YOLO, not in a hedonistic sense but somehow deeper, a way to find oneself within the maze of time and this encrusted ancient city by (not paradoxically but integrationally) allowing yourself to become overwhelmed.
Later, we have lunch in the Jewish Ghetto, then climb up a sweeping set of steps to a vista that opens (unexpectedly) onto the Roman Forum, which spreads beneath us like a tableau. Earlier, we stopped at the site of Circus Maximus, where tomorrow morning the Susan Kamen Race for the Cure is scheduled to begin. More overlapping, more lasagna. It is no irony that the race should start here; it is reconciliation, it is evolution, it is human resilience and continuity.
