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I have noticed three or four men whose appearance is more than less repeated. Of course they can be distinguished, but not by first glance like mine. However, they essentially have the same body size, haircut, general appearance and dress, physiognomy.

In Rome within easy walking distance I had places I could go to be alone to think , without being continuously, seeing or confronting tourists. You’re in the center of Naples I have not found a place of even remotely resembles that.

Naples has a centuries-long tradition of music and instrument craftsmanship. Listening to lute music and singing in the Port ‘ Alba passageway the past couple of nights would seem to me to justify luticide..

Two dog owners are walking their dogs on the sidewalk… One a man of perhaps 45, the girl wearing headphones, probably 15. The dogs check each other out completely, the owners ignore each other without even looking.

Very few recognize the body language with which they speak.

And soon the pretty much global hand gesture of writing the bill for a meal, will soon be replaced by a tap gesture for the tap charge cards!

Collective world-views, life-views, and experience, fully individualized by our time. Eg Facebook stories.

And naturally they (Pompeins) did not know that they lived in “79 AD” In (teir reality they of course didn’t.

No, I am inclined like you told to leave Rome behind and relax and Naples

A little woman in a small Greek café was more than a little too greedy. And contrary to my words upon entering, I will never return there Extra feta and does not turn a two €10 salad into a €26 salad.

Not Rome, not Naples, not even Italy itself, will assuage Steppenwolf’s solitude.

Goethe mentioned how the people live on the streets, their front doors opening onto the street and living inside an out — being able to look in and see their homes, their lives. Still true.

Naples seems more human than Rome.

Mein Lebensweg ist einzigartig und ehrlich gesagt „edel“. Warum kann ich nicht eher auf eine Beziehung warten, als ihre Abwesenheit ertragen?

That would Goethe experienced is somewhat similar today it is not surprising, considering that most people live in streams of social consciousness and traditions which take radical change for more than a generation to alter the direction of.

Goethe in Naples in 1787 essentially said “they just live”. I catch this movement and attitude. Though it is no more enough for me than it was for him.

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.