Italy woke me. Woke is the wrong verb. I’d say “gently ebbed me onto the shore of dream,” were it less flowery.

                  Jane and I spent the better part of four years in Rome, the first of our so-called retirement. We had no reason to be there except to be. Though married fourteen years when we arrived, this was our honeymoon. It takes time to be married, especially if you’re busy. Jane and I were busy when we wed. Now we had no appointments except with each other.

                  Italy showed me how to be. Americans are too busy to be. This is a wild generalization, of course, but sometimes generalizing nudges us to awareness. In our exact and contentious epoch, we must defend our assertions with data. Henry James, a hundred and fifty years ago, was freer to observe the personality of nationalities. Italians could differ from Americans from Brits from Germans from the French without igniting a storm of protest. “Discriminate” was not yet a pejorative.

                  What woke me, that is, nudged me out of my dream, was an aching sense of easy grace. Italians – more generalizations! – are better at being. Partly this comes from having been around so long. Italians’ memory stretches back three thousand years. George Washington (b. 1732 C.E.) is our Romulus and Remus (quarreled 753 B.C.E). The tinier your stature in time the less likely to strut. Americans – my last generalization for a while – are puffed with self-importance, vide the inflated clowns we’ve got leading us. Our glorious Nameless One equates himself with Julius Caesar and Jesus. (Make America Grotesque Again!)

                  The poem above epitomizes Americans’ distance from Italians. You don’t have to speak Italian to feel its force. Say it aloud (this is the whole poem). Let its warm sounds seep like syrup into your thoughts. Here’s a literal translation:

                  When Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) wrote this – in 1930 – he was not speaking for himself in his fraught moment – all moments are fraught – but for all selves in all time. Seeing oneself as minuscule, one learns modesty. Vanity and modesty evaluate differently. Vanity seeks stuff and acclaim to prove itself superior; modesty seeks the advantage of all. Vanity’s victory is modesty’s defeat.

                  It grieves me to be an American. I shudder with shame. How could we be so puerile, pugnacious, punch-drunk with power! I feel the eyes of other nations astonished at our misbehavior. What happened to the idealism of our Founders – “WE the PEOPLE”? How did we go so wrong? 

                  If America survives our current calamity, how to repair our tattered ideals? It is not enough to fix our laws, we must fix our souls. We must revert to the ABC’s of being, the obvious simple truths we seem to have lost. We must learn again that lying and cruelty and stealing and swaggering are wrong, not just arguably but absolutely. We must remember that none of us matters much but together we matter immensely and each should live for the benefit of all. We must suck the sermon from this little poem. Listen! “Ognuno” – each of us – equal in our humanity – “sta solo” – stands alone – alone together – “sul cuor della terra” – on the heart of the earth – at the very core (cuor) of the human enterprise – “pierced by a ray of the sun” – no translation required! – and “subito” – oh, how suddenly! – our day is done.