It is good to go away to be reminded how little one wishes to.
Some people are vagabonds by nature, others homebodies, I the latter. What I enjoy most about travel, which I delight in, is returning, that startling reencounter with the self you left, the same and yet changed.
I am not afraid to go away – I’m eager to – so I can return home. Otherness does not intimidate, it fascinates, by showing me me. For who we are is, in large measure, who we’re not. Our distinctness is our distinction. That I am not you commences our discussion. How come you chose this and I that? Which path is best?
Nearly two years ago, Jane and I decided simultaneously – separately yet in parallel – to say goodbye to Rome, where we’d been living more than happily for almost four years. Deciding to leave a place you’re happy is no simple calculus if you don’t have to. Jane had her reasons. Mine took me by surprise.
Yes, there were the obvious claims on our affections – family, friends, grandchildren especially, whose sprouting we missed from afar. There were the dreary sensible considerations of age and health: we were fine now but sooner or later we wouldn’t be and too often, as you get older, sooner or later becomes sooner. There was a sense that we’d seen much of Italy at least once and while few places on earth are less exhaustible, other places winked. Finally, there was a crisis at home, which made me feel a defector. My country was in trouble – and where was I?
These and other thoughts weighed – and feelings that hadn’t yet germinated into thoughts.
One feeling tumbled me like an ocean wave whose strength exceeds the surfer’s preparations.
I was alone in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. I love all graveyards for their evocations and sturdy common sense: this famous example was a familiar favorite. Keats is here – wailing – and Shelly – and other foreigners who, voluntarily or inadvertently, ended their days in Rome. I’d visit when I had reason to or for no reason. This day I’d come to pay my respects to the nineteenth century American sculptor William Wetmore Story, whose acquaintance I’d made through the Brownings, whose poems and blazing love letters I’d been reading. There’s a society of literature as of persons, through one one meets another, then another.
How I’d gone seventy years without encountering Story is a story for another day. I am often astonished by the folks I should have known but somehow missed. Time, place, interests overlapped, how could we have failed to connect!
Having paid my call on Story’s justly renowned and widely copied memorial to his beloved wife, I strolled the crammed rows in search of nobody in particular, browsing names, dates, epitaphs, musing about the lives these recalled. Nowhere is richer in stories than graveyards, where every stone murmurs a moral.
I paused at a marble headstone featuring a pretty relief portrait of the deceased. Her name was Brigitte. She’d been born a year before me and died at fifty, now almost a quarter century before. A vivacious society lady, it appeared, her epitaph offered no pious sentiments but thanked me for visiting, as if the afterlife were an afterparty. She reminded me, maybe unjustly, of my mother in her vivacious prime. Suddenly hot tears crowded into my eyes. I loved Rome – more than anywhere ever – but I didn’t want to end up here, a stranger among strangers.
It was time to go home.