When in Rome

It’s the guitar you’ll remember, the lightly strummed chords rising above the murmuring groups. The people are patchy, not packed, a few friends here or there beneath the soft lights and stars. You sit on the travertine steps to listen and see. A church rises behind you; at the bottom of the steps ahead, water flows through the Bernini fountain. Later, you will think you heard it, though the ambient noise makes this impossible. The fountain belongs in a scene of such quiet and peace, so it must have been, and in your mind, it was.

The scene is more construction than fact, now, twenty years after I last set foot in Rome. Still, the Piazza di Spagna remains one of my favorite places.

It shocked me to learn that not everyone has an internal monologue because my own surges so relentlessly. My brain seeks or churns, swirls or spreads, but it’s only the shape of the movement that changes and not the motion itself. I think.

I lean into this aspect of myself. I seek fresh materials that can alter the texture my mind flows over, or I pursue new channels of thought. I cannot relax by deadening thought; watching bad TV calms my wife, but for me, grinding through something mindless will elicit only a mental scream. I unwind best by following a course someone else has dug and charting it for myself. My wife and daughter don't understand how intellectual challenge can calm me, but it does. I cannot enforce internal quiet. It can only happen, and my mind quiets very, very rarely.

The Piazza di Spagna quieted it. Everything was at once peaceful and alive, unified. And it was beautiful.