Rome, Day 14

“Rome” itself(ves) is less to be studied than “Man”, men and women reacting to “Rome”. Four of course all comments throughout the centuries on Rome has been “man” attempting to understand, conceive and express in someway his experiences of Rome”.*

* This in part, in addition to the thoughts and observations of the last almost two weeks, by reading in Trevelyan’s Goethe and the Greeks, with Goethe reacting now to Sicily, Palermo. (p. 156)

I have also found citation to the letter extract in which Goethe accounts for his not accepting an invitation to go to Dalmatia and Greece with Prince Waldeck. It is difficult for me personally to understand – possibly rather “accept” – that Goethe declined this invitation.

I am still wondering what it means to “be in Rome”.Being here to me physically seems too little… The seagulls flying outside my seventh floor rented studio are in Rome in that sense. And yet what must one know, feel, experience, perhaps be, in order to say, one has been in Rome?

The visual “busyness” of the church is contradicted by its still forms and body which nonetheless dominate.

Felt guilty as a churchman walked by as I ,sitting alone in the church, searched the internet for an article on Nietzsche and Rome.

What Goethe sought was certainly not in this imperial skyward theo-anthropology. Rather than otherworldly doctrine, ritual, belief or Biblia, he sought in Nature, in Homer, in his Greek-laced Italy,…

Whereas Emerson would correct the Catholics, rituals, doctrines… by ennobling humans.

Both JvG and RWE essentially came to seek and find their own and Man’s Answers here on Earth amid men and women in time.

One such edifice as wherein I sit reveals the power of ruling belief.

A place of escape and consolation. Vertical escapes in the city.

After a semi-failed search for the building where Nietzsche stayed in Rome, but finding Jacob Burckhardt and Margaret Fuller’s places in the process, one glass of wine, and I am actually rather pleasurably lost in the back lanes of Rome.