The alleyway that remembers It is nearly eight in the evening in Trastevere, and the light has gone the color of weak tea. I am lost, which in this part of Rome is not a problem but a condition you learn to enjoy, on a street no wider than a hallway called Vicolo del Cinque. A...
The rack is still there. It sits outside a tabacchi on the SS2, the old Via Cassia, a few kilometers before you reach Soriano nel Cimino, and it turns on a rusted spindle that squeaks if you touch it, though almost no one touches it anymore. Forty-some cards, maybe fewer now,...
"Lord: it is time. The summer was too long.", Rainer Maria Rilke, "Autumn Day" The window in the guest room at Soriano nel Cimino never closed all the way. I noticed it the first night, and every night after, for years. A gap of maybe half an inch at the bottom of the frame,...
Never to get lost is not to live. Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost The rain in Lisbon that afternoon came sideways, off the river, the kind that makes umbrellas useless and irrelevant at the same time. I was standing under the awning of a shuttered tabacaria on Rua...
Never to get lost is not to live. Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost The lanterns go up in September, strung between stone walls that have held the same shape since before anyone alive can remember. By the first weekend of October, when the chestnut smoke starts...
"The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong.", Lois Farrow Parshley, translating Simone Weil --- There is a particular morning I keep returning to. Not because anything happened. Nothing did. I was standing at a bus stop in London sometime...
There's a bench in Paley Park on East 53rd Street in Manhattan that I've walked past maybe a hundred times without ever actually sitting down on it. It's one of those small vest-pocket parks the city tucked between skyscrapers in the 1960s, complete with a waterfall wall that drowns out the traffic...
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Never to get lost is not to live. Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost The lanterns go up in September, strung between stone walls that have held the same shape since before anyone alive can remember. By the first weekend of October, when the chestnut smoke starts...