After many years of wandering the Queen has finally found a home at RIC Journal…buona lettura
A heavy, humid day to September’s end an old tobacco and sweat-encrusted queen crookedly steps from the backseat of a car and shuffles across the white piazza. Middle-aged to twilight, she says to herself, I know why he’s pulled open his chest in all those pictures, his heart there.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
5 marzo 1922 – 2 novembre 1975
La verità non sta in un solo sogno, ma in molti sogni
E adesso, come allora, scompaiono cantando
The twilight border between sleep and waking was a Roman one this morning: splashing fountains and arched, narrow streets, the golden lavish city of blossoms and age-soft stone. Sometimes in this semi-consciousness he sojourned again in Paris, or war German rubble, or Swiss skiing and a snow hotel. Sometimes, also, in a fallow Georgia field at hunting dawn. Rome it was this morning in the yearless region of dreams.
– Carson McCullers, The Sojourner (1950)
On the ninth of August, 1964, Rome lay asleep in afternoon light as the sun swirled in a blinding pinwheel above its roofs, its low hills, and its gilded domes. The city was quiet and all was still except the crowns of a few slightly swaying pines, one lost and tentative cloud, and an old man who rushed through the Villa Borghese, alone. Limping along paths of crushed stone and tapping his cane as he took each step, he raced across intricacies of sunlight and shadow spread before him on the dark garden floor like golden lace.
– Mark Helprin. A Soldier of the Great War. Avon Books, 1991.
Seamus Heaney
(1939 – 2013)
(Photographer uncredited)
Back in May of this year we had the good fortune of briefly speaking to Mr Heaney here in Rome where he had been a guest at the conference Ovid Transformed. In his wonderful, musical voice with what grace he asked:
Seamus Heaney: “So, are you a writer?”
Reply: “Well, we pretend to be sometimes.”
Seamus Heaney: “Oh, don’t we all, don’t we all.”
Addio
