| | It's striking, somehow, that the thing that quieted all my doubts about this trip was not a city, not a meal, not a museum, but the very thing I hate most about traveling: the space inbetween. It was the train ride, a long train ride across that ever-rolling Italian countryside that won me over.
Looking out over the crests of those hills into the forests and fields below, that alone quited the twisting, unfathomable abyss that which whines underneath the steady beating of my heart. The whole source of my traveler's anxiety has been that miserable feeling of lacking an anchor, lacking a place from which to stand still, a home to go back to, but in that countryside I belonged.
I reckon if man is formed from earth, made from dust, then that Mediterranean earth is in my bones, that dust is in my sking-- and I am grateful for that. It is a good land, a generous one, yielding its fruit willingly, submitting to the long rows of vineyards and the constant needs of those delicate lemon trees. But it is a wild land, too, and in the sweep of its horizon you can find the same entrancing rise and fall of the Italian language, of the Italian mood; it is not something to be found in the flatlands of the midwest.
It is a good earth from which to be formed.
I love the the houses there; they rise out of the landscape so gracefully that sometimes they seem no different from the occassional yellow cliffs that emerge from the greenery. Did the settlers see, as they surveyed that untamed land, that it would only tolerate them if they humbled themselves? Did they give their hearts to the land, take its colors into their blood until they could only act in due accord with its aesthetic governance?
It is a good earth from which to be formed.
Oh, and what light falls upon it in the evening! This dying sunlight passing through a stained glass sky! It inflames those rose-petal hues of the clustered villages, it gives a final grace to the yielding day. A world most alive in its final hours; how strange. I admit it has been on my mind, that rumored decline of Europe, of our Western World, a settled complacency which speaks of late, declining days. And yet there is more fire in the twilight than ever I would have imagined. Has Europe's evening past? Is it yet to come? Oh God, say it is yet to come!
It is still a good earth from which to be formed. |
| | Posted 9/27/2007 1:40 AM - 15 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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