sometimes the elasticity of time snaps. left to talk about is rome and for some reason i don't think rome is going to get talked about too much. it was lovely. all that history and present in one place. at some point i was just staring and it reminded me of what freud said about the mind in the beginning of civilization and its discontents. consider a place, a piece of land, now think of all these things that have occupied that space, not even the people who have been there, but even just the buildings that have stood there. in physical space one thing takes the place of the other. if here their used to be a castle and now there is a low-rent housing development, we see the housing development and though we might imagine the castle given our awareness of the historical what is now standing is what stands. the mind is unlike this. its more like a picture book with those semi-transparent filmy pages, all stacked up and see through one another. for in the mind nothing wholly gets demolished, but there are always crumbling walls, adamant pillars and the like attesting to past thoughts and reasonings and intuitions and feelings. dear freud, i am sure your own words would have done you better justice, but. rome was this physical existence of an otherwise solely mentally contributed state. i rather liked to feel this about rome as we walked through it. and we walked. we walked a lot. circling and checking off the sites of interest along the way on our map.

we also just so happened to get to the vatican on a day when the pope was giving outdoor mass, seeing him and hearing him address the world in all the papal languages. the vatican museums were amazing, the maze-like walk to the sistine chapel wildly entertaining because much like the field trip i tagged along on last saturday to the botanic gardens, the allure laid safely in watching all the people around beyond the gorgeousness of the place. and we had gelato, which i approved of, outside the vatican at this little hole in the wall type place where the two dudes serving obviously had a zest for life and serving gelato. to witness such things is a blessing.