On "How I got here"

Fiesole, Italia

“A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority.”
–Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”

I suppose that my stomach is to blame for my being here. Several brief, prior adventures within the borders of the boot did whet the appetite, as it were, but one needs more time to really sink one’s teeth into a civilization.

I arrived here, in some sense, tired of the pervasive modern tendency towards uniformity, a kind of democratic soft tyranny that is coming to characterize the dominant American life and culture. I come to Italy seeking a respect for limits and place, seeking a people who understand their relation to land, history, tradition, and dare I say, the divine. Wendell Berry asserted that “eating is an agricultural act” and so I arrive eager to test the idea that one can discern much about a civilization by how and what it eats: if food is in direct relation to agriculture then it must in one way or another reflect history, economics, politics, and maybe even theology. I arrive with the curious hypothesis that the same slice of Prosciutto di Toscano or glass of Chianti Classico, which one might find in some overpriced SoHo purveyor of supposedly gourmet gastronomies, might in fact taste better in an enoteca on an idle Florentine street. There is something that seems right about enjoying these eminently enjoyable things in the very place wherein they originated and were meant to be enjoyed.

To eat, then, may well be the metaphorical aim of my stay, that is to say, to take in all that one can, and then be transformed by it all in some sense. I got here by a kind of hunger that would seem at least to be spiritual in part, a hunger that may only be satiated by as much immersion into everything as four weeks would allow. The only risk would be leaving in such a condition wherein, on struggling to exit a taxi and the driver asking why I don’t try getting out sideways, answering, as G.K. Chesterton did at the same question, “I have no sideways.” It is a risk worth taking.

PJD: The Future of Democracy in America

Fiesole, Italia

Here's a noteworthy piece

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2011/05/the-future-of-democracy-in-america/

What would Wendell say: Fiesole

Fiesole, Italia

There's an interesting juxtaposition at work in Fiesole. For one, I'm in the midst of a bucolic Mediterranean hillside, complete with a working olive grove. The view is stunning. At dusk, one no doubt knows that "the world is charged with the grandeur of God"...at least I hope that one knows that. And Yet that view is invariably experienced in the presence of the skyline of Firenze, complete with its Duomo. Does this medieval/Renaissance masterpiece of man detract from it all? Or perhaps we have two manifestations of the grandeur of God: 1. nature 2. that which man has created with his God-given reason.

Thoughts?