So there I was, with all the liberty that I had been promising myself for so long. The world was mine. How did I like it? I was doing just what I pleased, and instead of being filled with happiness and well-being, I was miserable. The love of pleasure is destined by its very nature to defeat itself and end in frustration. But I was one of the last men in the world who would have been convinced by the wisdom of a St. John of the Cross in those strange days.
But now I was entering a city which bears living testimony to these truths, to those who can see it, to those who know where to look for it—to those who know how to compare the Rome of the Caesars with the Rome of the martyrs.
I was entering the city that had been thus transformed by the Cross. Square white apartment houses were beginning to appear in thick clusters at the foot of the bare, grey-green hills, with clumps of cypress here and there, and presently over the roofs of the buildings, I saw, rising up in the dusk, the mighty substance of St. Peter’s dome. The realization that it was not a photograph filled me with great awe.
My first preoccupation in Rome was to find a dentist. The people in the hotel sent me to one nearby. There were a couple of nuns in the waiting room. After they left, I entered. The dentist had a brown beard. I did not trust my Italian for so important a matter as a toothache. I spoke to him in French. He knew a little French. And he looked at the tooth.
He knew what he thought was wrong with it, but he did not know the technical word in French.
“Ah,” he said, “vous avez un colpo d’aria.”
I figured it out easily enough to mean that I had caught a chill in my tooth—according to this man with the brown beard. But still, cowardice closed my mouth, and I was content not to argue that I thought it was by no means a chill, but an abscess.
“I shall treat it with ultra-violet rays,” said the dentist. With a mixture of relief and scepticism, I underwent this painless and futile process. It did nothing whatever to relieve the toothache. But I left with warm assurances from the dentist that it would all disappear during the night.
Far from disappearing during the night, the toothache did what all toothaches do during the night: kept me awake, in great misery, cursing my fate.
The next morning I got up and staggered back to my friend colpo d’aria next door. I met him coming down the stairs with his beard all brushed and a black hat on his head, with gloves and spats and everything. Only then did I realize that it was Sunday. However, he consented to give a look at the chilled tooth.
In a mixture of French and Italian he asked me if I could stand ether. I said yes, I could. He draped a clean handkerchief over my nose and mouth and dropped a couple of drops of ether on it. I breathed deeply, and the sweet sick knives of the smell reached in to my consciousness and the drumming of the heavy dynamos began. I hoped that he wasn’t breathing too deeply himself, or that his hand wouldn’t slip, and spill the whole bottle of it in my face.
However, a minute or two later I woke up again and he was waving the red, abscessed roots of the tooth in my face and exclaiming: “C’est fini!”
I moved out of my hotel and found a pensione with windows that looked down on the sunny Triton fountain in the middle of the Piazza Barberini and the Bristol Hotel and the Barberini Cinema and the Barberini Palace, and the maid brought me some hot water to treat the boil on my arm. I went to bed and tried to read a novel by Maxim Gorki which very quickly put me to sleep.
I had been in Rome before, on an blaster vacation from school, for about a week. I had seen the Forum and the Colosseum and the Vatican museum and St. Peter’s. But I had not really seen Rome.
This time, I started out again, with the misconception common to AngloSaxons, that the real Rome is the Rome of the ugly ruins, the Rome of all those grey cariated temples wedged in between the hills and the slums of the city. I tried to reconstruct the ancient city, in my mind—a dream which did not work very well, because of the insistent shouting of the sellers of postcards who beset me on every side. After a few days of trying the same thing, it suddenly struck me that it was not worth the trouble. It was so evident, merely from the masses of stone and brick that still represented the palaces and temples and baths, that imperial Rome must have been one of the most revolting and ugly and depressing cities the world has ever seen. In fact, the ruins with cedars and cypresses and umbrella pines scattered about among them were far more pleasant than the reality must have been.
However, I still roamed about the museums, especially the one in the Baths of Diocletian, which had also been, at one time, a Carthusian monastery—probably not a very successful one—and I studied Rome in a big learned book that I had bought, together with an old second-hand Baedeker in French.
And after spending the day in museums and libraries and bookstores and among the ruins, I would come home again and read my novels. In fact, I was also beginning to write one of my own, although I did not get very far with it as long as I was at Rome.
I had a lot of books with me—a strange mixture: Dryden, the poems of D. H. Lawrence, some Tauchnitz novels, and James Joyce’s Ulysses in a fancy India-paper edition, slick and expensive, which I lent to someone, later on, and never got back.
If you can get past the horrific dentist scenes in thia passage (which is the stuff of nightmares), you may find Merton's tourist experience of Rome, at least at this point in his memoir, fairly typical. I know that, when I go on trips to new places, I find myself both drawn to all that's new around me, but also retreating sometimes to the familiar (books or poems or people). It's what keeps me grounded. Reminds me who I am.
I just started teaching last week at the university. As with most things in this pandemic, it was an exercise in re-invention and re-imagination. It's like visiting Rome for the first time. I've read about all the places, studied pictures and maps, but I'm finding the actual experience of the city completely unexpected. The Colosseum and St. Peter's Basilica and Sistine Chapel are Martian landscapes. Alien. Extraterrestrial. As if Michelangelo was a Jedi night, and the entire city a Vulcan temple.
In fact, most of 2020 has been like that for me, even before Covid-19 infected the public consciousness. I sort of feel like E. T., lost on a strange planet, not quite knowing how to get home. I wander around most days, searching for something that reminds me of my old life. But my old life has been disassembled and scattered to the far reaches of the galaxy.
So, I'm sitting on my couch right now. Most people in my household are asleep. I have music going in my ears. Modern and instrumental, it was an album sent to me by a friend who understands my struggles. Has been where I am right now. Stranded and alone. This person doesn't offer advice or tell me what to do. Instead, I get music and jokes texted to me, with comments like, "This helped me."
Music and books and writing and close friends like this. That's pretty much how I've made it so far in this alien year. And I have a feeling, by December 31, I'm not even going to recognize who I am. E. T., in order to get back home, had to die, if you remember. And then he was resurrected, like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon, or Christ walking out of the tomb. In any time of great upheaval, the struggle is always followed by rejuvenation. Months after the Hiroshima bombing, panic grass and feverfew reclaimed the ruins of the city, a "vivd, lush, optimistic green."
I am waiting for the panic grass and feverfew. The Christmas-ball spaceship to descend from the heavens.
Saint Marty is ready to return to his home planet.
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