Four Seasons in Rome

I just finished this beautiful, slender book that Lacy sent me at the end of the summer. It reminds me of so many things, most of all of Lacy who is already in my mind at this dark season, in this melancholy, slightly bruised moment of every year. Lace, whose words have so many times been a balm for me, whose silent support is felt every single day. Lacy: thank you! My gratitude that you are in my life is beyond words (for verbose people like us, this is the true statement).

But also Doerr’s words reminded me of my own memories of being little abroad, of my own brave mother taking two small children to a foreign country where she spoke not a word of the language. It reminded me of a now-faded, washed-out photograph of the four of us, Hilary in a stroller, standing in some square in Paris. My own memories are intertwined with the rounded-cornered photographs that Dad so painstakingly put into albums, his unmistakeable fountain pen scrawl captioning each one.

Doerr’s description of the papal conclave reminded me of those days of pomp and arcane tradition, of unfamiliar words (holy see, interregnum, camerlengo) rolling around in my mouth. I remember being at Dunkin Donuts in Newton with Christina, Charlie, and Grace when the news stations announced the white smoke. White smoke! We have a pope! I will never forget that. For some reason the whole drama of it all fascinated me, and I’ll never forget that moment, when history collided with my very mundane modern life.

As I must, I close with some of Doerr’s passages that I loved the best:

Having a baby is like bringing a noisy, inarticulate foreignor into your house and trying to guess what he likes to eat.

A good journal entry – like a good song, or sketch, or photograph – ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world.

The space is both intimate and explosive: your humanity is not diminished in the least, and yet simultaneously the Pantheon forces you to pay attention to the fact that the world includes things far greater than yourself.

We are simultaneously more happy and more worn out than we have ever been in our lives.

You find your way through a place by getting lost in it.

Henry and Owen see more images in a day than Pliny saw in a lifetime, and I worry their generation will have to work a bit harder than every previous one to stay alert to the miracles of the world.

Whoever says adults are better at paying attention than children is wrong: we’re too busy filtering out the world, focusing on some task or another, paying no attention. Our kids are the ones discovering new continents all day long. Sometimes, looking at them, I feel as if Henry and Owen live permanently in that resplendent, taut state of awareness that we adults only reach when our cars are sliding through a red light, or our airplane is thudding through turbulence.

This year has been composed of a trillion such moments; they flood the memory, spill over the edges of journal entries. What is it physicists tell us? Even in a finite volume, there are an infinite number of points.

I wonder if the same thing is true for this Roman light: If enough of it enters our eyes, if we look at something long enough, maybe we incorporate it. Maybe it becomes part of us. Maybe it flashes around inside us, endlessly reflecting, saturating everything.

all from Four Seasons in Rome, Anthony Doerr