Again, it is fortunate that I am renting an isolated studio, isolated from neighboring apartments and buildings, as I woke myself up this morning around 4:30 am yelling out quite loudly: “Help!, Help!, Help!”. I was walking in my dream a street at night and a car drove up with four or five men in it with nothing better to do than make problems for me. In fact they were going to attack me…I listened to hear sounds of any fellow residents… but the studio is isolated and Rome is not without louds voices and even yellings at night (by the sounds: tourists having fun).
And when I read in “American Novelists in Italy” that “at least one hundred professional American writers traveled to that country [Italy]. and subsequently published works concerning it,…” well, it allows me to relax rather fully since a study of reactions and relations to Rome would take not months, but years, indeed it is essentially impossible… probably insufficiently useful… So relax end enjoy what I will. And this does not even consider those of interest from Britain, France, Germany, Russia…
Plan to go see the spectacle at/of the Holy Stairs (Scala Santa [sic]) this morning (Luther), and the church of Saint Augustine sometime today (Augustine).
He or she who would have the deepest insights into “Rome” would in part depend on their worldview.
When in reality is Man not talking to itself?
Even if the icons and paintings of ideas, beliefs are illusions, they are greater than perhaps nearly all who come through here. I might tend with Dostoyevski to believe the simplest, humblest is nearest to Truth here. Certainly not a lonely, needy “Steppenwolf”.
Peter and Paul, sacrificed and thereby sanctified here in Rome we’re not enough, they must bring stairs, part of the bed on which they imagine Jesus lay…
Can such personal thoughts, critiques, showings,.. not be sacrilege in a place like this?
A depth, a level, a reality of conversation with Life and Hstory and Tradition and “Reality”? belongs to such a room as this. Such Conversation as almost never occurs in normal daily human life and society.
Is Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” any more or less fiction than the writings of the four gospels? Seriously.
To amble around even a basilica, as a tourist is one lived reality, but that of a serious seeker?
Goethe, and for that matter, Emerson, essentially rejected “the fall”. And indeed may ask what, among even miserable little human beings can be so ultimate, as to require such a drama of salvation?
Essentially, these are internal notes recorded in this chapel. Where I have been at least half an hour alone completely. Rhea and Rome.
I believe it is a real human, personal, accomplishment, and achievement, even a realization, to self recognize one’s relation to the verticality of ideas of life and world present in the churches of Rome. as embodied in this chapel, where I have been able to quietly reflect and think. Certainly my deepest day so far in Rome. And can it be surpassed. I doubt that many of the scores and scores of visitors from many countries came to such a clear, conscious personal position, but then many did not approach here with decades of studying religion and philosophy.
Two others entered. Now I leave.
An American on the 87 bus speaks in full voice in the silent crowd led bus, of what he knows only in part. Eg the stone, whatever it is called, with three languages “Hebrew and two others… egypttologisrs” and so on.
No matter who or what, I consider tattoo people to be barbarians. Perhaps they are proud of it.
Oh, the psychic irreconcilable? Disjunction of life inside the church and on the streets?
Those found guilty of seditious conspiracy are also responsible for their stupidity.
Of the hundred or so people at the conversation about translation at the American Academy of Rome, I just felt no strong, compulsion or need to speak to any of the people, however intelligent and pleasant they appeared. so some Prosecco and hors d’oeuvres, and I walked out to watch the sunset and the moonrise.
Waiting for a German visitor to arrive from Munich in two hours, rather than walk around Saint Peter’s and God, I decided to go onto the streets where the sinners are.
Near 10 pm: A couple walked by with their young child, perhaps three years old… Seeing two big white dogs (with their owner sitting near me smoking a cigar) the father kept repeating a sound which I assume was “dog”, but which was completely unfamiliar to me.
Stephen Lapeyrouse . . . Notes Dropped Along the Way 