Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Part one - VII
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built in between the houses in a street. It is a bit of the Rome
of the robber barons. We know comparatively little about that
time, but I am very interested in it at present. I find in the
records names of dead people, of whom sometimes nothing is
known but their names, and I long to know more about them.
I dream of Rome in the Middle Ages, when they fought in the
street with fierce cries, and the town was full of robber-castles,
where their womenfolk were shut up — daughters of those wild
beasts and with their blood in their veins. Sometimes they
broke away from their prison and mixed in the life, such as it
was, inside the red-black walls. We know so little about those
times, and the German professors do not take great interest in
them, because they cannot be remade so as to convey abstract
ideas; they are simply naked facts.
“What a mighty current of life has washed over this country!
— breaking into billows round every spot with town and castle
on it. And yet the mountains rise above it bare and desolate.
Think of the endless number of ruins here in the Campagna
only; of the stacks of books written on the history of Italy —
and on the history of the whole world for that matter — and
think of the hosts of dead people we know. Yet the result of
all these waves of life, rolling one after the other, is very, very
small. It is all so wonderful!
“I have talked to you so often and you have talked to me;
yet I don’t really know you. You are just as much a mystery
to me as that tower. — I wish you could see how your hair shines
where you are standing now. It is glorious.
“Has it ever struck you that you have never seen your face?
Only the reflection of it in the glass. We can never see what
our face looks like when we sleep or shut our eyes — isn’t it
odd? It was my birthday the day I met you; today it is yours.
Are you glad to be twenty-eight, you who think that every year
completed is a gain?”
“I did not say that. I said that you may have had so much
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