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The structures in which we live our lives are much more orderly and commanding than we as humans. Made by humans; they are more than human. (At FCO Airport)

Ethan, those of my somewhat “lighter” posts on Facebook” I rarely reacted to buy my “friends”. Not indicating their superficiality, but my depth.

The inner invisible “writing” is the most important, and essential. I must remember this.

A month ago I could not figure out what busl/tram to take from this same location. Now I am flexible at quick changes of bus stops.

And I know the house, a Dante Where Dante never was.

Without stories Romes is stones.

This gate from 1584 is a good contrast to the unhistotical woods of western North Carolina to which I shall return in just over three weeks.

Is it not a kind of areligious, if not irreligious, non-confessional confession to come here — from the overly-cold benches of preferred Piazzella Caffarelli (with its overview of the physical inner city of Rome) — to this solemn enclosed other- and inner-worldly sanctum with its (specific Society of Jesus) sub specie dei view of Mankind, Life and World, to record my higher, mundane and personal thoughts about Rome and my stay — two days from ending — in Rome?

As the black-garbed churchman walks by looking a bit scepticalliy at me. Would he not disapprove of this my mixed sin of solipsism? Yet the heavens, beliefs, aspirations incorporated, inarted, indesigned,… here are otherworldly to not only me, but the outer street life of Rome. Do the many tourist who wander through this and the many churches of Rome also “sin” with their mere curiosity, photography, unmeditative passing presences here. And how many worry about such personal mundane thoughts and being in a church?

An other churchan (I think) kneels at the left recess of the Church before a painting with Jesus apparently holding a red flag, the Standard of the Society of Jesus, with Ignatius. (Reading about it, I learn this painting actually descends to reveal a French-Occupation melted down statue of Loyola. Called a “Baroque Machine”!

I cannot write in my journal here in this Church. Contrast of outer and inner. Both too much of separate stories.

I received an email about the local bears and raccoons and neighbors… doesn’t compare to Rome…as I sit in the Piazza del Popolo.

I can only suppose that the churches nearby to Johann, Wolfgang, Goethe, and his artist friends home in Rome could’ve offered little, if anything for a life guidance, had they even wanted such. what he needed and wanted. The church did not offer what he wanted or needed. He wants is among else to experience not suffer the world.

The closest in Rome I have come to Augustine. The relics, the remains, of his mother, Monica.’

What is the Catholic Church without relics?

I found on the amazing Internet a good article on Goethe and the Catholic Church, which I will read later, possibly this evening. Right now I seem to be one of only three or four others on this regional train to Tivoli.

As it happened, Tivoli was in rain, drizzle and fog, and I return immediately to Rome by chance, with a very intelligent well self educated Kurdish women, with whom I spent the day walking and talking in Rome. Delightful. If I were only so smart and knowledgeable at age 23!

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.

I prefer the Pre-Romantic Romanticized Rome of Piranesi, from around 1750.

A clever book, ancient Roman Monunents Past and Present with 15 Reconstructions (Staccioli, 2022) of famous historic/tourist sites reveals how impossible it is to imagine the Rome of the pass by looking at the meagre remnants of Rome in the present.

Going towards the dome of Saint Peter’s. Faces in the crowd going in: motley, the unsupported in societies, less educated, less beautiful, of groups.

From on the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica the late teen American male asked: “Where is the sixteenth chapel?”

And does one need to know modern Rome in order to know Rome, to be in Rome?

The experience of gawk?

Along with the Roman Forum, which is really an incomprehensible remnant of what it over the years was, I suppose this is the main “event”, the last place in Rome for me. Reaching and descending from the Dome (in spite of claustrophobia acquired on an impossible-tight window-seat mass-tourist charter flight from Moscow to Cairo…)
Does not my decades-long Bildungsreise in the “Old World” end here? In St. Peter’s. The final necessary place to experience and consider “History” in situ? From Mobile, Tuscaloosa…. through Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, et al.

So a kind of “big day” for me, though only I will know it, and the one person who seems to be reading these notes dropped along my way.

And to make my final point:

After all one’s Bildung, what, perhaps near the end, inner stance does one have? towards one’s own life, Life, and World?

Again — if more strongly in the touristless churches — the abrupt disjunction between the life outside the church and the solemn silence inside. If more solitarily after Luther, more deeply uncertain “after Nietzsche”, the deepest questions of Mankind and Meaning are present(ef) in the elaborated embodied Meaning of Catholic Belief — in these structures of enmeaninged, “elevated” matter via art. Most surely are not clear on the contrasts and experience. Probably even of the deep disjunction. Some seem to experience the life of the streets, of the world outside, as mean passage to the inner sanctuary embodied eor instance where I now sit — Church of the Holy Trinity* of Pellegrini. Others surely come by custom and hope; some with deep need. Others enter curious, like in an unfamiliar museum of Meaning: a serious solemn… but (e)strange(d?) Meaning. From eg Luther to Nietzsche (also but more lightly in eg Emerson) not the Fall of Adam and Eve but the Fall of Meaning… Should most “Thank** God” they don’t notice, know this, think** this?

*If any aspect of theology calls up problems in those who don’t unquestioningly believe, “The Trinity” is one the serious problematic elements of doctrine, of belief.

** “thank you” comes from “think you”.

And if there is no Patertheos? What meaning has the man on the cross? And if this great Meaning of (Hi)Story has become unbelievable or irrelevant to Life and World. Wherein and whenin Life and World, but not god, are capitalizable for Meaning? From Moses to Camus, et al?

This all mostly off the tourist guides narrations, and most worldly Grand Tourists as well. I come with deeper needs and troubles, from loss of naive belief… A plane crash entailing theodicy… A 60’s “pagan pluralistic revival” destroying accepted, inherited belief…

When, after trying the door to the toilet, the person also knocked on the door, I predicted that s/he would be waiting in the soace with the sink inarguably for maximum one person. He was, and he had a backpack on as well. He had to squeeze in by me. Is it too much to expect that he be conscious of how that would occur?

If one is not much worried about sin, why be a Christian? As I walk the Corso from Casa di Goethe in Rome it occurs to me that Goethe certainly wasn’t.

It seems that Friedrich Nietzsche came to Rome no reason unbeliever, but as a active disbeliever. I allow myself to believe I am deeper than that. But then, I have been to Mount Sinai, and stayed a month on the Mount of Olives, so perhaps I have different problems — and questions– from Nietzsche, or Goethe or Emerson here in Rome.

What I can only imagine considers his self to especially be a man, walked by smoking, a cigar, a woman at his side. I can’t imagine kissing such a mouth and breath!

The photos I took inside Saint Peter’s basilica are so good they are like acts.

This is the kind of “philosophy” which almost drove me away from it permanently in 1971 when I experienced its kin by a dreadfully boring lecturer at the University of Alabama. “Philosophy” as logical positivism. Meanwhile, I made my way decades later to the legendary cave of Pythagoras on Samos.

And even if Pythagoras and his cave are fully mythical, I prefer that to the hard fact desiccating dearth of person and mind of that lecturer in Tuscaloosa in ’71.

*http://steppenwolfmoscow1.blogspot.com/2013/12/modern-misosophy.html

In the greater world today wherein lies any “power” in Rome? Obviously in the Papacy. Obviously not in any passing Italian government. Otherwise, it seems to lie in the mystique of Rome in history.

The main political problem in the USA is not the “political system”– it is the political citizens.

How many grand tourists were changed by their Italian journies, and how many returned the same, save for momentos? Bildung. Misbildung. Unbildung.

I People with thoughts and insights

What was it they painted that we needed, and want, and why. An assuagement of death?

Most Romans do not live in “Rome”

Periods of escaping our time. Our world.