Eleanor Clark
THE FOUNTAINS OF ROME
You walk close to your dreams. Sometimes it seems that
these pulsing crowds, with their daily and yearly rhythms established
so long ago none of it has to be decided any more, with their elOO,ws
and knees and souls and buttocks touching and rubbing and every–
body most pleased and agreeable when it is like that, in a bus for
instance, will in another minute all be naked, or will have fish tails
or horses' behinds like the characters of the fountains. For the Anglo–
Saxon mind, ruled by conscience and the romantic, rigid in its
privacies, everything here is shocking-an endless revelation and im–
mersion; this is the vocabulary of our sleep; and the key image is
always water.
That is the great assault of Rome, ,and it is total and terrible.
It is really strange that foreigners of the polite centuries always used
to wax so romantic about the fountains of Rome, and the music
supposed to represent them was such as any young girl could listen
to. The truth is, they are extremely indecent, in various ways. Their
number is indecent, much as the lives of the Caesars were; common
reason expires here; it is of their nature too to make those lives quite
ordinary, nothing surprises you beside them. Their settings are apt to
be extravagant; they can have sprung up anywhere, be tacked any–
where on the sides of buildings or are themselves a whole house wall;
and their details have the candid, smiling sadism of dreams. But the
worst is the life around them, and their part in it. They are not only
memory, or the living singleness of time, though they are that too
and the city would have fallen apart under the weight of its past a
long time ago without them; this is easy to see; you notice at once
when there is a drought and the fountains become quiet and stale,
or empty, how old everything begins to look. But there is another
