I've never loved Rome, the city where I was born. I had only the vaguest impressions until I visited it several times about seven years ago, and decided it wasn't for me. Its will to impress, to take one's breath away, seemed clumsy and overbearing; the churches, with precious objects heaped up alla rinfusa, seemed more like treasure chambers than churches. It lacked the delicacy of Medieval and Renaissance cities, like Venice, Florence, or Bologna; it lacked the humane, sturdy cheerfulness of those last two, and the splendid melancholy of the first; in fact I couldn't read any expression in it beyond, "Bow down to my wealth and power." The ruins were impressive and sobering, but entirely discontinuous with the modern city; they stick up suddenly, like skeleton fingers from an unsuspected grave.

That has all changed. I know what I was thinking, which buildings I was looking at, but I see other things too now. Partly because I know more. (You can be perfectly ignorant and still fall in love with Venice, but not Rome.) Partly because I've been taking public transportation. (Last time I hung on for dear life behind my friend & host, a daring motorcyclist.) But for another reason too. I went to dinner at the Cortesi (who told me the dove story) following Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Lots of pompous, heavy, boring buildings. "Take via del Governo Vecchio on your way home," they suggested. It runs parallel to Corso Vittorio Emanuele (which might as well be called "via del Governo Nuovo"), and it's another world — narrow, winding, quiet and mysterious but (because of all the cafés and restaurants) lively at the same time, the buildings full of leering, laughing, weeping stone faces; glowing lanterns shedding irregular light on the street signs, which have always looked like grave stones to me. (cp. the street signs in Florence — cheerful blue and white ceramic, like Delft.)

And so behind most square, flat, regular things in Rome I think there's something winding, irregular, round and deep. The ruins, once no doubt the most regular, imposing things in the world, embody this doubleness, but many other things do too.

There's a curved street with a curved apartment building on the concave side of the curve; the reason for the building's unusual shape is that it's built on the old Teatro di Pompeo; a colonnade extended several hundred meters from the theater to the civic complex of Largo Argentina, and the Cortesi say that in their building's basement there are the stumps of some of these columns. Those blocks are now a warren of little streets, and I like to think of the columns still marching (furtim) from basement to basement to their old destination, the site of Caesar's assassination. (I would say "like a ground-bass," but that sounds too much like a pun.)

There are other things: Rome is much more appealing at night — at least in this season — than during the day. And there's the good nature, the energy, and (in some neighborhoods at least), the vigorous informality. I can even say that sometimes, in certain lights, the heavy buildings remind me not so much of power, arrogance, and a ton of bricks, as of a big, clumsy, shaggy dog, eager to please and to make its presence known. It steps on a lot of toes, but means no harm.

Here I am in Rome, studying Latin. My mother reported to me that her friends had asked, what was I going to do with it? And so I said that after I finish this course I'll be able to teach more advanced students, and that Marvell wrote some poems in Latin, and I'm interested in neo-Latin poetry. All of which is true, but I think it's a bit rich of these academics to ask why I should want to study Latin. Why do they do what they do? It's their job, fine. But does their job feed anyone? How can it be justified? In the end you're left with an article of faith: thinking about these things is a good in itself. I'm actually quite happy to say that studying literature and history equips us for our own lives, but I know my mother is against this means-to-an-end argument: she believes in history for history's sake. No compromises with expedience. I'll accept that, but she shouldn't question how I spend my summer. Especially after teaching so much this year, I feel no compunctions about abandoning myself to the luxury of study for two months.
There's also the feeling: we owe it to the past — to the legions of dead who were once so alive — to think about them. I know that's something R. F. feels strongly too; why else would he draw our attention to the shrug of the shoulders, the wry, half-finished joke, the saltiest colloquial moments? Why else, to point out the obvious, would he speak in Latin? He often says, "This morning, friends, this happened this morning," about something that in fact happened 2000 years ago. (But: this approach scants extra-ordinary uses of language — we hardly do any poetry at all.) I don't think we'll measure up so well to posterity: we produce too much excruciatingly bad prose. In comparison to the Romans — to anyone before the 20th century — we shall seem humorless, wooden, false, pompous, inhumane.

Update: I told my mother to read Alexander Stille's chapter on R. F. in The Future of the Past, and now she's thrilled about my course — prompts me to talk about it in company, etc.

A horrible story:

(This happened to friends of friends in Rome.)

A dove* flew into an apartment, and kept very quiet, perhaps hiding in a corner, or under a bed. Then the owners left for vacation. When they came back the stench, of course, was unbearable, but even more striking was the amount of damage the bird had done in its death agony, weakened though it must have been by hunger. Any number of glass and ceramic objects were in pieces, and even the glass on picture frames had been shattered. Perhaps the bird thought they were windows.

*"colomba." You can think of it as a pigeon if that makes it any less awful.

A few weeks ago my sixth grade was going to critique Danny's essay in response to this question: If you could spend an afternoon with any author, living or dead, with whom would you spend it? What would you talk about?

Danny can be annoying, he's often lazy, but every once in a while I realize I don't give him enough credit; in any other class he'd be a star. He wrote his essay on Dave Pilkey, author of the Captain Underpants series (which I'd never heard of, but his classmates knew what he was talking about). His essay contains the following endearing passage:

We could exchange ideas for books that he is planning to write, or make comic books. I always run out of ideas when I try to write a story or a comic book, and after I finish it sounds lame from a lack of ideas. He could help me when I get stuck and we could have fun writing, drawing, and reading books.

I like the good-natured honesty of "lame from a lack of ideas."
The transcripts of student essays that I hand out are anonymous, but of course they're all eager to know who the author is, and since Danny is the class expert on the literature of silly and indecent humor, I and Danny, in his way, were the only ones keeping up the pretense of anonymity. Danny was torn between embarrassment and pride, and he dealt with his mixed emotions by hamming it up: whenever we pointed out a flaw (but mostly we said good things), he'd shake his head and sigh, "I can't believe the author made such a foolish mistake." In my printed transcript I had written "Dan" for "Dave," and Danny asked me, "Ms —, how could you make such a mistake?" And I answered in the same sorrowful tone that he was using, "Well Danny, some students' handwriting is not what it should be." The class erupted in laughter: "Ooh, she got you there!" Danny was laughing too.

I've had more than a thousand pages of US history in the past month, and I'm getting tired of it. Not that the books I'm reading aren't very good, and not that the subject isn't interesting, but I've had enough. Now I'm reading Middlekauf's The Glorious Cause. He's clear, funny, and detailed, but I miss Wilentz's passion. Wilentz could be funny too, but his humor was mordant; Middlekauf's is airy and light. He seems to think that everyone was getting a little too excited.* Of course, he never says this; it's in his tone. And actually I'm sure he doesn't think it either. In fact, I'm being terribly unfair, and perhaps it's just like what happened when I heard the Brahms Requiem and the Mozart Requiem in one day, in that order: the juxtaposition made Mozart sound like fluff. I hated myself for thinking that, but couldn't help it. Moral of the story: eighteenth century first, then nineteenth century. Never the other way around.

*which is one's suspicion about the American Revolution to start with. Middlekauf's introduction insists that there's no irony in the title. Later on, he admits, "On the surface the Americans' preoccupation with their property … seems petty, demeaning, poor stuff with which to make a revolution." He tries to explain why it wasn't, but... One just has to assume that the ideas of "rights" and "property" were on a seamless continuum — not such a hare-brained notion in the days when small farmers could be economically independent, before the crop-lien system. But still!

I've loved the past few days of rain. They've made me happier than I could ever be on a sunny day, brimming over with happiness, at one with the raining world.
And the curious thought occurred to me: it wouldn't be so awful to be dead if it rained like this on one's grave, one's humble mound. Partly in the banal sense, that even gray, sad things are necessary for life, partly like this:

Ninetta mia, crepare di maggio ci vuole tanto e troppo coraggio,
Ninetta bella, dritto all'inferno avrei preferito andarci d'inverno.

But largely, I think, because the wateriness of it all made the dissolution of identity seem less terrible.
Sort of the opposite of a thought that obsessed me when I was an impatient teenager: I can't falter, because I'm frozen. My frozenness makes me strong.
(Am I not still impatient? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! But the rain made me content to shrug my shoulders and stay indoors, instead of going out and devouring the world with my eyes.)

Books:

February
Lucy Gayheart (Cather)
Storia della Linguistica (Mounin)
The Glimpses of the Moon (Wharton)
We (Zamyatin)

March
The Ruby in the Smoke (Pullman)
The Shadow in the North (Pullman)
Parallel Lives (Rose)

April
Only Yesterday (Allen)
The Book Against God (Wood)
The Rise of American Democracy, Jefferson to Lincoln (Wilentz)