Part of my study abroad trip to London and Rome in September is a series of blog posts about some assigned readings, and reflections upon them. This is the ninth such post, and is two of two about Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome.
I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry – like a good song, or sketch, or photograph – ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world.
Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience – buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello – become new all over again.– excerpt from page 54 of Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome
I remember that feeling from when I moved from Oregon to North Carolina years ago. Part of the move had been about a need to get away from Portland, from all the memories that were like a film over the town, all the reminders of people who weren’t there anymore.
North Carolina, sadly, was not different from Oregon in ways that were pleasant though. But there was still, for the first couple months, a sense of wonder at the difference in the colors that made up the world. All of the trees seemed to be drawn in a different shade of green, the sky seemed tinted a bit more purple, and both the sunrise and sunset were not the same given that different mountains that made up the horizon (if you can call what NC has mountains.. bah.).
Ultimately I found that the ways NC differed were not pleasant ones, and I returned to OR. But even then, it was a different Oregon, enough had changed in Portland that the film – the ennui, the glaze of memories – was gone from the city. For a little while at least the city was new to me again.
I doubt that two weeks will be enough of a trip for Portland to seem new again, but to see London and Rome for the first time. To see a culture that is not American. I wonder what color, what shade, the sky will seem to me.