The most empty, thoughtless, superficial tourist and the deepest, most educated, thoughtful, perceptive seeker have in common that they go and see things. Most are somewhere in between these, but what they superficially share is seeing. “What did you see today?”
Is there a time in history when one can note graffiti started to mar cityscapes? Or major cities? In which major city it started? I remember seeing the first small graffiti markings in post-Soviet Moscow. The smallest pencil markings on the wall in a building, or outdoors in a very secluded place. Tsvetnoi Bulvar
As my ear was still able to detect, the couple, behind me were from Austria.
Most of the Catholic Church’s scale are f enormity rests on a true Ontos of sacrality of physical remains. Such ideas and beliefs were, kin to my view, already convincingly rejected when relics began to be worshiped. An important part of the history of ideas of which most tourists to Rome and other “holy places” have a little if any idea. I gained my insight on this while, studying in Moscow, preparing for one of my summer journeys to historic locations.
For those in whom Christianity is an external service.
Do I come over 99% of Rome and its life to see 1? Today is Saint Pauls not daylight interest me
As I approach my last location in Rome associated with Saint Paul… It occurs to me that I am a pilgrim of sorts… but to History, not holy relics, to Insights rather than Salvation.
Three clean and nicely dressed women are on the ground at the entrance to this abbey… But as I look at each one, and study them, none of them ask me for money. I am pleased with that.
To me, it is less a question whether this was the actual pillar on which Saint Paul was beheaded, than how long in the centuries ago was this believed and how did it affect the church, beliefs, and pilgrimage.
This would be the equivalent of Golgotha in Jerusalem.
How many indifferent to religion have never seriously thought of its vertical meaning as to be somehow true. A superficial “rejection”.A deeper indifference.
I suppose for example Johann von Goethe and Henry David Thoreau never seriously took Christianity to consider.
Such a relationship to life of sorrow I heard in that midday service.
The only way I might not be a strong presence in a room is when I am silent, and wearing sunglasses.
Peter may be the Petrus of the Church, but what would Christianity be without Paul… And how be it that Paul’s traditional place of martyrdom is so little visited*? Did even Luther go there?
*Though Paul’s traditional place of Martin burial is clearly Built for more süße Tourist Believers.
I take regularly photos like this, but my friends see me through fog and clouds
This evening, before hurrying to Sunset, I seem to have booked the remainder of my trip (Napkes, Crotone, Palermo [Goethe, Urpflanz], Caltabelotta [Ravenscroft] all the way to Augustine’s Ostia the day before I fly back to North Carolina. From thick civilization to the second growth woods of North Carolina..
Stephen Lapeyrouse . . . Notes Dropped Along the Way 