Looking both ways: questions about where we have been and where we are heading

from Valerio d’Abruzzo, Roman correspondent, 1 January 2016

Greetings from Rome, where last night on the Janiculum the city looked as splendid as ever, though with fewer fireworks (political fears have suppressed, even here, the customary civic madness). I reached this vantage point from the Aurelius, walking up the passeggiata after spending the afternoon sampling the sweets and cheats of shopkeepers in the old city (Sant’Eustachio il Caffé conveys both). I can understand, among the couples and lone faces, why this hill was Camus’s favorite spot in Rome. It afforded me time to think on the coming and going of the years, even to think back to the worship of Janus here, the god with two faces who marked the ancients’ sense of boundaries and crossings.

What boundaries, what crossings? Of tribe, as the Romans expanded their dominion? Or of nation, as here, 150 years ago, Garibaldi resisted the French-Vatican legions? No, these are topics for another letter. Certainly nations have clashed and crossed this last year, whose defining characteristic has been the Great Migration from East to West, South to North, making Europe – even Italy – once again seem important. The pope has opened empty churches and monasteries to the homeless migrants and refugees, while the number of pilgrims this Jubilee Year has diminished by a third. That is an irony also worth considering another time.

But the Great Crossing, here on this day, is that of time. And since I am writing in an English idiom, I call to mind the New Year’s verses of the catholic John Donne:

This twilight of two years, not past, not next,
Some emblem is of me, or I of this;
Who – meteor-like, of stuff and form perplex’d,
Whose what and where in disputation is –
If I should call me anything, should miss.

The crossing is the middle ground, everywhere but nowhere, universal but invisible, an instant that vanishes. Zeno of Elea would convince us that a flying arrow never moves, since it is at rest any given moment. Yet we do move, stepping and never stepping into the same river twice. Below me, the Tiber is the constant, everpresent artery of Rome’s diseased and equally beautiful mind: but what treasures and bodies does it submerge and entomb, whose recovery, similar to that of Laocoön and His Sons, would only remind us of our age! The “Renaissance,” for all its recovery of antiquity and awakening the ancients from their sleep, must have brought thinkers and artists into their second infancy, not so much their re-birth but their dotage: they realized what had been forgotten as much as what they now remembered.

If we listen to the poet in twilight, we flame like meteors, like the banned rockets and candles at New Year’s Night. How do we know what we are, who are never at rest? We might preserve a moment, but what we observe, and our observations, are in motion. On New Year’s Eve a number of years ago a friend and I climbed another hill, the Schlossberg in Freiburg, and raised a toast to Heidegger. That was another hill, at another time, but it reminds us we look both ways: backwards to moments that ascend in memory, and then ahead as we recall our journey along the river of time. We age twice over, on the journey and in the recollection. Whatever we know, we know im Mitsein, as Heidegger would say, in our disposition to the world around us, a locus, like the Janiculum on New Year’s, where the airs of past, present, and future combine.

I am sitting now at the Fontanone, the great Fontana dell’Acqua Paola, whose waters a lesser-known poet called the “wildest and sweetest of Rome.” I behold, it seems, all of the city. It occurs to me that I am writing not only to you, my editor, but also to all readers, many of whom tire of philosophical musings and instead ask about their own place in this conversation. We should, they remind me, look both ways in another sense, not only toward the arts but also toward the sciences. To them I would say, look at this fountain. It is visually impressive, if too self-consciously grand in its baroque triumphalism. Pope Paul V, its namesake, almost seems to have invented, rather than restored, the acqueduct this side of the Tiber. But for this instant leave that aside, ignore the rushing water, the history, and the lights below, and consider how at this time and place, science can meet the demands of society, and be celebrated in architecture. Here, too, we look over the exchange of knowledge, which is never whole but always seeking its complement. To the scientists among you, find your philosopher in Pythagoras, who discerned in number and harmony the ultimate meaning of things.