I mean, it's Rome. It's like wading through layers. You feel the weight of the sun, the heaviness of the smoke, the dirt on the ground (and the dogs poop freely :) and the sheer gravity of the history, and all the remarkable beauty- absolutely impossible to capture. It's begun to feel more and more like swimming up stream.
I was thinking today, it'd be nice to be in a dark forest right now. A safe, pleasant one that's moist with huge stars above and a nice tree hole to just curl into. Also, a BIG drenching thunderstorm. No smoke, no aggressive drivers, no people, and fresh mountain air. For just a little while.
But I won't complain anymore. It probably sounds silly. (It actually is nice to write about the things I see, because at the same time it helps me work through the flood of sensory overload.)
Today we went to see the Keats and Shelly house. It sits on the right side of the Spanish Steps.
Keats and Shelly were friends. Keates lived a very short life and died tragically at the age of 24 in this house, separated from his love in England. Shelly is another important Romantic writer, though I mostly remember his wife who wrote Frankenstein.
Ode to A Grecian Urn by Keats: http://www.bartleby.com/101/625.html
Fun facts about Keats:
He was less than 5' tall, and felt very manly around his love Fanny, who was shorter than him.
When gravely ill with tuberculosis in Rome, he hated pasta and would throw the plates delivered to him out the window.
He wrote his best works while sick. Sorry if this is a gross fact, but after his death the doctors discovered his lungs were absolutely gone- consumed by the disease. It is amazing that he lived so long with it.
He was fascinated with "beauty and truth."
He was buried with his love letters from Fanny unopened, too pained to read them.
The house is now a sort of museum. We saw letters, original books, the library, even letters about Keats by Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, and Oscar Wilde. To the right, his sketch of an urn from the Louvre that inspired "Ode to a..."
His supposed "death bed" was there, along with some odd things that felt more creepy to me than thoughtful: locks of hair of the Shellys and him, the jawbone of Mr. Shelly in an urn... I suppose keeping these things meant something different than today.
John Keats is one of my favorite writers, under the genre of romantic writing. It is strange to me he never opened the letters from Fanny. He cherished her words and spirit so, yet couldn't overcome his personal grief to emotionally support her pain. Anything to do with literature or writers..would have been a favorite of mine.
ReplyDeleteI perfectly empathize with you, in regards to your yearning for peace. Is there any green spots close by, a park perhaps? Those places provide solace to me. I am with you in spirit!