Helia’s Reviews > Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World > Status Update

I wonder if the same thing is true for this Roman light: If enough of it enters our eyes, if we look at something long enough, maybe we incorporate it. Maybe it becomes part of us. Maybe it flashes around inside us, endlessly reflecting, saturating everything.
they are all eyes of God. We look through them; they look through us. Everything is designed around the light.

The light tiptoes across everything, exposing it anew, whispering, Here is this! Here is this! Ecco Roma! Bursting out of the sun, streaking through space, skirting Venus, just over eight minutes old, but eternal, too, infinite —here comes the light, nameless and intangible.

it feels as if something in the Pantheon expresses that, in the intersection of structure and sky, in the simultaneous expression of a building renewed and a building in ruin, the way the circle of light at the top lingers when everything else is in darkness.

Knowledge is relative. Mystery can be cultivated.

A line from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead comes back to me. “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”

Rome is a broken mirror, the falling strap of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballast hidden beneath the surface.

the spines of the books around me seethe and rustle, each a chronicle of someone’s mind, a brain that has washed into this city like a wave and broken itself against it.

Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. Did he mean that to write your name in stone is vanity? That all of us, foreigners or locals, are ultimately anonymous?

A history of power and vanity like a labyrinth stamped beneath the streets.