Time, Distance and Clarity

By FRANK BRUNI
NYT

Above Rome’s pale yellow and dusky orange buildings, the sky somehow looks bluer than it does almost anywhere else. Did I take proper note of that when I saw it all the time? When it was the canopy over my waking, my working and the all-consuming, all-distracting tedium of daily life?

I worry I didn’t. And I wonder how, during the two years when I called Rome home and wandered frequently through the Villa Borghese park, I never noticed an especially lush, shady patch near the Galleria Borghese that I stumbled across recently, on a return trip. Like the sky’s vividness, the discovery unsettled me. So did the regular peal of church bells, a music that must have been the soundtrack of my past but that I remembered only vaguely. It seems I failed to hear it — to listen — back then.

This is the stretch of the calendar, from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, when many of us revisit the places we’ve left behind. These journeys can be difficult, and I don’t mean the brawls over the overhead bin. Nor do I mean what Thomas Wolfe did when he contemplated the messiness of going home again, stirring up resentments and confronting how much we — and it — have changed.

What weighs on me is the opposite: how much everything has no doubt stayed the same, coupled with the recognition that I didn’t appreciate or really even examine it before. The sorrow lies there.

(More here.)