Elizabeth Gilbert: EAT

From Italy...

"Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth." -- Sheryl Louise Moller

never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend...

"Liz you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new."

He said if Maria had truly allowed herself to be overcome by anger-- which she never does, because she's a good Anglo-Protestant-- then she would have written all over that wall in her native English. He says all Americans are like this: repressred. Which makes them dangerous and potentially deadly when they blow up.

Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porm to theme-parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Alarming statistics show that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices then they do in their homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don't really know how to do NOTHING. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype-- the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.

Bel far niente ... the beauty of doing nothing
l'arte d'arrangiarsi... the art of making something out of nothing.

Dear God, I could use a little break from this cycle, to give myself some space to discover what I look like and talk like when I'm not trying to merge with someone.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious moument to somebody, true enough-- but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.

My mother has made choices in her life, as we all must, and she is at peace with them. I can see her peace. She did not cop out on herself.

All I could say was, "I don't know what to do." I remember her taking me by the shoulders and looking at me in the eye with a calm smile and saying simply, "Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth." So that's what I tried to do.

Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword." On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where "all is correct." But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, "all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course." Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.

The Bhagavad Gita-- that ancient Indian Yogic text-- says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So now I have to start living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy, as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.

These weeks of spontaneous travel are such a glorious twirl of time, some of the loosest days of my life, running to the train station and buying tickets left and right, finally beginning to flex my freedom for real because it has finally sunk in that I CAN GO WHEREVER I WANT.

Anyhow, it's hard to be depressed with Linda babbling beside me, trying to get me to buy a giant purple fur hat, and asking of the lousy dinner we ate one night, "Are these called Mrs. Paul's Veal Sticks?" She is a firefly, this Linda. In Venice in the Middle Ages there was once a profession for a man called a codega-- a fellow you hired to walk in front of you at night with a lit latern, showing you the way, scaring off thieves and demons, bringing you confidence and protection through the dark streets. This is Linda-- my temporary, special order, travel-sized Venetian codega.

Don't you know that the secret of understanding a city and its people is to learn-- what is the word of the street? Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be-- that is the word of the city. And if you're personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there.
What's Rome's word? SEX.
The Vatican? POWER.
NYC? ACHIEVE.
LA? SUCCESS.
Stockholm? CONFORM.
Naples? FIGHT.

What is your word?

Italians have drawn the seemingly accurate conclusion that nobody and nothing in the world can be trusted. Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one shouldtrust only what one can experience with one's own senses, and THIS makes the senes stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captains of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent "opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors..." In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.