Gospel & Universe ♒️ A River Journey
Rome 1: Sunset
From Vineyards to a Field of Flowers - The Lights Dims Over the Cities of Light
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From Vineyards to a Field of Flowers
You take one long last look at your vineyard, with its troops of grapes marching over the rolling hills of the Dordogne. Breathing in deeply, you look up at the gables of your imaginary rented chateau. You admire the odd shapes of the roof, and the fine spires poking into the sky.
You know that you can’t linger in the Dordogne forever: if you’re going to understand the skepticism of Montaigne, you must go to Athens and Rome. So you say a brief (but tender) goodbye to the cooks and butlers, making sure they remember to store the foie gras in the cold cellar. Winking at a pretty maid, you order the footman to load your trunks onto your 1989 calèche à Deux Chevaux, which proceeds westward along the river, heading toward Bordeaux. On the outskirts, you take the ring-road south of the city to the airport, where you board a plane to Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. From there you take the Leonardo Express to Roma Termini, and the #64 tram into the heart of the Eternal City.
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You roll your small suitcase along the uneven cobblestones, and toss it into your hotel room so that you can get out into the streets again. The light is starting to wane, so you find a restaurant in the open square of the Campo dei Fiori. This is the tourist heaven, the Field of Flowers, where the morning market stalls give way to the afternoon outdoor cafés, which give way to the glowing lamps of the evening restaurants.
The square comes alive at night with orange and yellow light as darkness settles over the city. You order an Aperol Spritz, to calm your travel nerves and to allow you to feel where you are.
You are in the middle of the city that was once the capital of the Roman Empire. 2000 years ago. The Eternal City. You don’t know if there’s such a thing as an eternal city — be it the Seven Hills of Augustus or Augustine’s City of God — and yet here it is, all around you.
The Lights Dims Over the Cities of Light
The thought of great cities reminds you of the opening of Conrad’s 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness. In the first pages, Marlow sits on deck with his fellow crewmen and watches the sun set over the estuary of the Thames. He reflects out loud on the fate of empires, as the river stretches before him “like the beginning of an interminable waterway.” He sees a haze rest “on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness.” Ominously, he adds that the “air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.”
Marlow suggests that while the sun hasn’t yet set on the British Empire, the darkness has always closed all around. Two decades before the Amritsar Massacre, and half a century before the dismantling of the African colonies, Marlow recalls the power that has flowed out from London over the centuries, from Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind in the 16th century to the early 19th century warships the Erebus and the Terror:
[The Thames] had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests — and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith — the adventurers and the settlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ‘Change; captains, admirals, the dark “interlopers” of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned “generals” of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore.
Marlow suggests that the sun will set on the British Empire just as it did on the Roman Empire. He then imagines a Roman soldier travelling up the Thames into Britain 2000 years ago. Turning the tables on anyone who in 1899 might be overly smug about English notions of civilization, he suggests that the English were once the savages and that power and culture is a function of the historical moment:
Imagine him here — the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina — and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages, — precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore.
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The wine of the Dordogne is still flowing through your English blood, mixing with the deep orangey-red of the Campari. You know that here in 21st century Rome there is plenty to eat and that the wine is Falernian, Rhenish, French, and Californian. In terms of Augustine’s God, and in terms of everything that a civilized Western man might want, this is still the centre of the world. You are already ashore.
You look out into the dark night, the lights blazing inside you and across the square. The lights are blazing everywhere — except, that is, under the heavy hood of Giordano Bruno.
Bruno too had his moment in history, like a bright jewel flashing in the night of time: he openly professed a belief in infinite space and infinite worlds. Yet the Church would have none of it. And unlike Galileo, he wasn’t in the recanting mood. His flashing in the night of time thus became a very particular sort of flashing: he was burned to death in this very square in the year 1600. He wasn’t immolated by Augustine’s God, but by the zealots who believed Augustine’s God was the only God.
One can only wonder what the aliens and the gods, watching from above, might have thought about that.
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The deep orange light of the lamps is absorbed by the mixture of Prosecco, Campari, and sparkling mineral water, which flows into your system and colours everything you see. Your journey to the Eternal City has just begun.
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Next: Rome 2: Odysseus, Prufrock, and the Philosopher’s Cave
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