At the time of a needed early coffee this morning, I went to a local café, where I had regularly espied a British-looking long-haired man with whom I thought sure I could have a conversation about life in Rome. Indeed. Very interesting man Andrei. Brand designer. I was quite open with him about my life situation, and he gave me his own insights of travel and life in our times. Having been born and raised in Rome, he agreed that now tourism is near perpetual throughout the year. He also agreed that people come to “Rome” even if they have no idea why. He was clearly at parting genuinely glad that we had met and spoke. Rather that I had spoken with him. And even the owners in the café, where he goes every single morning, treated me noticeably different when I paid for my cafe latte, and they didn’t charge me for sitting in the patio. I told Andrei that if he were Californian, he would be less insightful and wise. It was he halfway through our conversation who asked my name. I showed him my photo from the night before of the sun setting on top of Saint Peter’s basilica, and from a couple of days ago, the extraordinary photos took inside the Basilica itself. He too recognized their extraordinary character. And them as a’ part of my early story in Rome’. I would move here for half a year to year were it not for my felt duties, though not obligations, to a retired not-fully-healthy friend in North Carolina.
Wandering, ambling, slowly toward the Casa di Goethe, for a showing this evening of an old, silent film about Faust… I much prefer the infrequented lanes.
Some lanes’ windows are offensive to a Steppenwolf merely by their exaggerated shallow view of man as matter and body. But rather obviously most are not thinking about that.
Was Rome as per Gibbon more fallen from Christians then, than by wealthy or eye shoppers now?
As with the writers and philosophers cafés of Paris, what meaning does this café have when it is filled with empty headed gawker tourists?
An other roseseller with whom I spoke was from Bangladesh… I wonder if the rosesellers of Rome are mainly from there?
I am simply not one who could spend much time contemplating the face of this bust
To turn to Homer and the Greeks, Goethe must have understand that Christianity provided no sense of a vitality and growth for life and living.
Walking back to my Roman studio from the Faust movie, passing the Marcus Aurelius column, a couple walks by with the woman speaking perfectly predictable Russian intonations. It was one of the aspects of why I wanted to leave Russia: I not only knew the cityscape too well ,but the psyche of most of the people, and even the intonations on the streets had begun to infuriate me with their predictability. Human unvariety.
Stephen Lapeyrouse . . . Notes Dropped Along the Way 