We were driving up the
November 19th, 2002We were driving up the highway back home, and when we stopped to get gas I pulled out my camera and took pictures, because, after all, gas stations in Italy are not the same as gas stations here, and driving on an Italian highway is as foreign and new and unusual an experience as seeing the Pantheon (if less transcendental, and making for less ecstatic rambling. Although I could try to ramble ecstatically about Italian highway-driving. Want me to try?)
I sat greedily watching out the window as we sped along north. If I had wings, this is where I would fly. I would fly from town to town and buy bread and cheese and oranges and then fly on again. I would fly up these rock-faces, and soar over these forests, and circle these hill-towns, I would nest in rocks or valleys, away from the cities where homelessness at night had meant fear. If I had wings, the world itself would be my home, and I would sleep where I chose; I would fly around the great dome in Florence, and perch there for the night. If it rained, I would sleep under a bridge, a bridge such as this-
Under a bridge, someone had scrawled in spray-paint "Te amo". "I love you too!" said I in return, quite earnestly and without thinking about it. And so I looked at it, and loved the writer because he had written it, until I reproved myself.
"How can you love someone you don’t know?" I demanded. "You do poorly enough with those you do! Would you love him if you did know him? Suppose him to be base and cruel and false, all the worst things, the most despicable things, suppose him to have done the things you would kill a man for doing. You do not know that he is not! How can you say you love him? And all those who did not scrawl out their declarations on public property, do you love them?"
But this did not have much effect on me. I loved the person, whoever he or she might have been, because they had connected themselves to me. No matter how inadvertent it may have been, I saw what they had written, and so I knew there was a person - good or bad, admirable or contemptible - on the other end of that communication. I loved them, not for writing, nor for character, but simply for existing, and they existed for me because of that scrawled highway message.