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PARTISAN REVIEW
unity or community within every single moment to which they are
essential, and that is where the real outrage comes.
The romantic, the idealist, tho tender-minded of any vein dies a
thousand deaths in these fountains; their every dolphin is his nemesis.
The very genius spent on them makes them shocking. They are
not
objets d'art
held off from life and treated with respect as they
would be anywhere else; there is a closeness, an imminence of touch
around them that nothing in our life has except dreams and sex,
whence the awful burden on those. They are always being drunk
from and splashed in and sat on, everybody dips into them as into his
own private memory and quite often they have all kinds of rubbish in
their lovely basins, because although the street-cleaners of Rome are
many and hard-working they cannot be everywhere at once.
The churches likewise; it is all physical and close; God is not
up in any Gothic shadows but to be touched and smelled and fondled,
reached into up to the armpit. The Anglo-Saxon, hunting every–
where for French cathedrals, feels
his
mind threatened like a lump
of sugar in a cup of tea.
The spaces are shocking. They are close too, and give no warn–
ings, so that suddenly the Pantheon or the huge volutes of Sant'
Ignazio are crowding right over you; you are not allowed to stand
off, it seems you are not allowed to admire at all ; it is as though a
giant mother were squashing you to her breast. Besides those freakish
squares and the narrow streets around them, most vividly in the old
quarters, Trastevere and
all
the part between the Corso and the
Tiber, do not constitute an
outside
in our sense, but a great rich
withinness, an interior, and running water is its open fire. Even a
tourist can tell in a Roman street that he is in something and not
outside of something as he would be in most cities. In Rome to
go
out is to go home.
There are no sidewalks in these sections. The walls rise from the
cobbles as from lagoons, only people are sitting out all along them,
under the laundry which is a drastic exposure in itself, more than for
any Kinsey or Gallup, and unless they are playing football they are
most often mending something. That is one of three occupations you
see anywhere in Europe that are no longer known in America:
people walk, they carry, and they mend. Not only women; men are
mending too, in thousands of dark bicycle and mattress shops and
