For nearly three years now I have told myself dystopian stories to get myself to sleep at night. I take the events of the world that distress me and spin them out to their worst conclusions in order to look them in the face and control my own fear.  This is the one I told myself last night.

What if Trump is the Reichstag Fire?

Pence and his ilk, who must watch Handmaid’s Tale to take notes between wanks, have been using him all along, encouraging his worst tendencies, hoping he will ultimately do something so outrageous that Congress must act to remove him from power. Meanwhile, they enact their own far-right agenda, get one Supreme Court justice in, and another in the wings. Then, they move to oust Trump, their Clown who has kept their base, the minority who kept them in power, entertained and preoccupied. They do this before the mid-term when, by this time, all polls predict many of them will lose their seats. In ousting him, they suddenly become concerned about the election hacking and say that our system has become so compromised that we must suspend elections “temporarily.”

Except, the suspension continues indefinitely, or continues until the rolls can be purged of the “undesirables.” They can target undesirables, too, by using social media to determine political affiliation. Polling places in liberal, black, Latino, and immigrant districts become fewer and further between before they disappear altogether. People will have to declare a party affiliation, ending the “independent” designation.  Donated to Planned Parenthood, to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Amnesty International? Suddenly they can’t find your name. They start with the margins and work their way in.

I could go on, and I will tonight as I try to go to sleep . This was a hell of a week to stop drinking, and melatonin can only do so much.

I had a blog once, under another name, in what now seems like another life. I started it so that my brain would not rot. I wrote to get the words out of my head and because writing seemed like the only machete I had in this forest that the road less travelled had taken me. “Less travelled” is not the correct metaphor, but that whole story is one for another time, if at all. In any case, that blog led me to begin my next book, and writing that book led to another blog under my professional name. The first blog fell by the wayside, finally shuttered. It served its purpose.

Now, the next book has become my last book. The work of a near decade is a thing in the world. That thing in the world has readers; indeed, readers who are not historians, readers who are not academics, readers who enjoy reading the book, readers who voluntarily write positive comments on Amazon, and readers who award prizes. Yes, my book won not one but two prizes! (Sadly, the award was not a leg lamp.)

Heck, as of the past week, I even have a troll. A troll who has a minion. A — as in one.  Really, you haven’t truly arrived as a lady writer until some abusive white guy in his thirties demands that you engage in “civil discourse” with him or suffer the consequences.

This success brings with it a little melancholy. The book had been so much a part of my life for so long and the subject for much longer. He, the subject, had become a veritable companion on vacations both as I worked on the book, researched, or visited the same places he did. Now, it is over. There are talks to be given, books to review, even more blog posts to write; but still, the work is done.

The passion driving the work? What to do with it? I loved the subject so deeply. The sickness — no, the intense wellness — insisting that I could know all, learn all, must find out more and tell the story emerged from my adoration of the subject. Now, much like the ending of a romance, I dread a future in which I shall never feel that again; and who am I if I am not madly questing for a story? What is life without that quest for a story?

Ok, I’m being a bit overly dramatic. I will be me and life will go on.

Melancholy has tinged this past summer for many reasons. The spring drained me for many reasons both good and not so. Physical ailments annoyed me. One has kept me from jogging, which I use to combat melancholy. I could not think a full thought, or even a half thought for much longer than a second, nor concentrate to read more than a sentence at a time. Solitude seems impossible for reasons beyond my control. Bitch, bitch, bitch, as my mother used to say. We should all have these problems.

The melancholy comes from mourning the ending of the last book. Now, I must work my way into the Next Book. So, I’m going back to the thing that worked before, but with that experience. A blog. I’ll keep it pseudonymous for a bit, until I work things out. Then, maybe move to the professional name.  But, I’ll do what I did before. I sort through ideas and see what happens. Writing for a blog, an imagined audience, gives it much more of an imperative than a journal. I have one of those anyway and it is for the real bitch, bitch, bitching. This is for the Next Book and, since I’ve set the precedent already and since I rather like the space to do this, other creative things unrelated to the Last Book and therefore inappropriate for that blog.

Onward to the Next Book, whatever it may look like!

Last week, a reporter interviewed me about my experiences with sexual harassment. She got my name, which I had volunteered, from a scholar who is conducting a survey about sexual harassment and abuse in the academic world. That is one of my formative stories, sadly, and filling out this survey in which she asked not just about the harassment but also how it affected my mental health, the trajectory of my career, and the course of my life allowed me to stop and look back at half of my lifetime as a whole narrative. The harassment wasn’t just a bad incident that ended and I moved on. The harassment acted bit like the flutter in butterfly effect, if the butterfly were more like a pterodactyl, or a nudge that shifted everything else along the way. There is much to explore there, but while speaking with the reporter, recounting the events to her, the question that continued to echo from that time was “what do you want?”

When someone has targeted you, so many voices begin to put the onus of responsibility on you. The responsibility to prevent whatever will happen, to stop whatever is happening, to seek retribution, to do something. Generally, whatever you do will be wrong by someone else’s standard, so you have to act carefully.

At first, I denied what was happening, partly because I felt ashamed that it was, in fact, happening and I felt it was my fault. I denied also because I felt helpless, stupid, and alone. Then, when I could admit to myself that he was behaving badly, that I could not continue for however long finishing my degree would take, that he, in fact, did not have my best interest in mind, I could hear all of those other voices blaming me, shunning me, telling me I should report him. In fact, I thought reporting him was an act of last resort in the worst circumstance, if he did something like rape me or demand sex. I thought that, if I reported him, I’d be attacked for taking that route. I also felt that I’d be a pariah for reporting him.

“What do I want?” I asked myself. I wanted him to stop. So, I got away from him. I found another advisor, and when that advisor was unable to protect me because he was beholden to the first, I found yet another. This meant a change of specialization in study, which no graduate student would ever survive today.  Indeed, I almost didn’t survive it then because I could only find that third advisor after they hired him via an independent, inter-disciplinary study program. So, I was very lucky.

I also felt very guilty when I watched the harasser move in on someone else. I don’t really know her story. One of her friends told me that the new target had figured out the harasser’s game pretty early. She also had figured out that she didn’t want a doctoral degree. The Harasser had talked the new target into finishing a terminal master’s degree, one with no thesis, and taking all of her classes from him. She said she went ahead, knowing that he would give her an A no matter what she turned in, then she would at least get a degree out of her investment.

He moved on to someone after she graduated. I don’t know the newer target’s story, either, but I did hear that, at one point, she ended their association by having her husband call the harasser to tell him to pick up all of his research material from a project that they had been working on (for a tobacco company, no less). She would leave the material in boxes on the curb by her house. No need to knock. There was another rumor that the husband of a student called the harasser up and told him to stay away from his wife.

The harasser had a reputation that preceded me, I gradually learned. A friend put together my stories with stories from another friend whom the harasser had gone after when she was an undergraduate. That other friend knew of someone else, as well.  This all made me feel less idiotic, less culpable, less like I had done something to bring this on myself. Still, knowing that he was a serial harasser, I believed that my desire to save myself rather than turn him in had made other women vulnerable.

At that point, even removing myself hadn’t really saved me. The harasser wanted me completely gone. He retaliated against me by ensuring that I did not receive renewed funding. “Report him,” advised my informant, who had discovered this for me.  I did.  After all, I had nothing to lose. What did I want this time? I wanted him to stop.

The first time I wanted him to stop harassing me, and I did still want that because he was continuing to interfere with my life. This time, however, I also wanted him to stop harassing other women. I had been knocked off course badly. Other women should not have to endure the same. Our male colleagues did not have to face these obstacles, and that was not just.

The system was not just, either. The system protects neither the victim nor the accused. they system protects the institution. The school determined that nothing had happened that could be pursued and filed the complaint away under my name only.  The department used my complaint to remove him from the funding committee, but they were far more interested in neutralizing a bully in departmental politics than in protecting students.

I’ve recently learned that he still has the reputation as a harasser. That astounded me, but not really. A man who had been harassing women in the 1980s, harassed me in the 1990s, and now, well into the 2010s, still harasses women, or at least has the reputation for it, and is still employed and holds a named chair position. That seems about right, given the news. I can hear those voices say, “why are you complaining? You turned out o.k. and life isn’t fair or just. Suck it up!”

I’m not complaining, just describing. If anything, I’m disgusted; and I did suck it up, so to speak. I did what my male colleagues did. I did my work. I did it while being harassed. I did it in the long, depressive aftermath of being harassed. I took my exams earlier than they did, passed them when over half did not, and still lost funding because the harasser wanted me out. My male colleagues took their exams later than I did, failed, and kept their funding and they were not harassed. When I did have funding, I was assigned to be a t.a. for two classes (when the usual was one) with no extra pay, but later, when a male colleague was assigned to be a t.a. for two classes, he received extra pay, and my harasser was on the committee that made these decisions. I restarted my specialization because I had to escape my harasser. I taught the equivalent of full-time via multiple part-time jobs, in addition to holding part-time jobs because I did not have funding because my harasser made sure that I did not. I turned out o.k. through sheer luck and the charity of key people along the way. I’m scrappy. The fact that I turned out o.k. does not justify the harassment. It does not justify that, as a direct result, I had to do everything my male colleagues did, only — as the Ginger Rogers joke goes — backwards and in high heels.

When that reporter and I spoke, I wondered, “what do I want?” What do I want by talking about this now? Him fired? Him exposed? No. He is exposed where he works. People there know. He’s close to retirement. I don’t want retribution on him. His worst punishment is to be himself, a washed-up, bitter old man, which is really what he always was, even when he was younger than I am now. This isn’t about him, or even me. This is bigger. I want my experience to be part of the data proving that this happens, that it has always happened, and that it had consequences. I want it to be part of the data that makes people realize that people in positions of power use sexuality and gender to diminish the talent and ambition and humanity of women.

I want to one day be able to tell this story to a class and for them not to echo back stories of their own.

These were observations that I made through the autumn, as the news of Harvey Weinstein brought this sexual harassment into the public consciousness again.:

When you have been through an abusive situation, you end up carrying a pack of stones around. Only one stone is the abuse itself. Another is the shame. Another the guilt, then the sense of betrayal, the second-guessing yourself, the should-have dones, the feeling that you have no right to feel this or to feel that because it really wasn’t that bad because there are worse things and other people have suffered more, the meanness that grew and spilled, the guilt about the meanness, the regret, the need to protect others, the returning every day because you have to return to the scene of the crime, the poor choices you have to keep on explaining decades later that you had to make, the loss of whatever good you thought about yourself that made you think you had no other type of choice to make, the pre-existing conditions that became chronic that made you feel weak and more ashamed, the mistrust, the misplaced trust, the lost time to every single stone in that pack. The exhaustion. You don’t notice most of the time, for decades, even; but sometimes, some asshole somewhere, along with everything that backs and surrounds and protects him, reminds you of that first stone and you feel all of that weight pressing you down. (October 13) 

Me, too. (October 16)

Too many of us, too. It is the air we breathe. It is the geography of our world. It is the script of our conversations. It is in every contingency. There are as many responses as there are women (and gay men), and none of them are right because they all have repercussions that diminish us. Sure, we endure, with that pack full of stones. Too many of us, too. (Later in the day, after nearly every single woman whom I know chimed in. October 16)

You know when you explain your experience to someone, saying “this is what it felt like, this is what I went through, this is how I saw it,” and that person responds, “no you didn’t,” and you say, “yes, I did, and I know because I’m in this body going through that experience and this is was it felt like,” but that person says, “no you didn’t” then they proceed to tell you what you felt and experienced despite your protests? What do you call that? Is there a word for it? (November 4)

Why do certain people have such a difficult time treating women like human beings? (November 14)

Came across an interesting term in reading about dark tourism: “Post-emotion,” in which a person or people are incapable of feeling empathy for those outside of their own, immediate family. I know people like that (and perhaps have been people like that at various points in my life). They are “good people” to their family and even close friends, but have a sort of siege mentality about the rest of the world. (November 14)

Al Franken is the reason many women don’t trust men. When even the guys who are supposed to be on your side amuse themselves by treating you as no more than T & A, we always have to wonder when the other shoe will drop, when we will discover the exact quality of their sheep’s clothing, when we can just breathe. (November 16)

This is what you learn, growing up as a girl: We are expendable. We have always been expendable. Useful, at times, but expendable, even to ourselves. Some of them are overt in hating us, passing laws that disempower us. Others say our concerns are a distraction, not real issues, not economic issues. Still others pass laws to protect us, to do other good things, but show their disgust in a million covert ways. They placate us, and we offer sacrifices, praying we never become the sacrifice ourselves. We are all bitches after we leave the room. Tits, ass, pussies, bleeding, weeping, reproductive organs. A sum of parts without minds. Too much and never enough. Defective by default. Never a whole person. (November 17)

After reading “A Eulogy to the Everyday Geniuses We’ve Lost to Toxic Work Culture.” From the article: “Let us instead lament a masculinized work culture so colossally blind that it devours dreams large and small, stymies talent, and holds women back, despite research clearly showing that having women in leadership leads to higher returns, lower risk, and more innovation.” In the next paragraph she quotes a woman who says something about soldiering on and having been taught that “not being able to take it” was weakness. But, these women take everything the men do, in addition to what the men dish out. That is: backwards and in high heels. Perhaps if more female genius had been allowed in along the way, the loss of these “‘great’ male artists and leaders” wouldn’t be felt so painfully. (December 8)

Does it not occur to people that, after three months in which sexual harassment and assault have been in the news every single effing day that maybe, just maybe, they should remove “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” from their holiday song rotation? It’s not even about the holidays! It is literally about a man refusing to take “no” for an answer then trying to coerce her by saying that she’s hurting his poor, manly feelings by not doing what he wants. That’s not cute. That’s textbook asshole. (December 20)

After reading “When #MeToo Goes Too Far” in the New York Times.:  Yes, Mr. Stephens, “listening is essential.” You know what listening often sounds like? You being quiet while the other person speaks. Here is a first class, epic example of Concern Troll mansplaining. In other words, what NOT to do if you are being begged by women to listen to our experience while we try to find a way to dismantle the attitudes, environments, and structures that create the spectrum on which all of these wrong behaviors exist. (December 21)

Such a complicated, perplexing, and nuanced question! If someone asks this with a genuine interest — someone who is not a doctor, that is — I find that I have three interlocking spheres of response.

The first, for lack of better word, is macro or global, falling into the category of the “other than that” part of the sick joke about Mrs. Lincoln’s opinion of the play or Mrs. Kennedy’s thoughts on the parade.  My rather inelegant response here is usually, “wehaveanti-intellecutalauthoritarianstakingovertheworldbutespeciallyourgovernment thisistheendoftherepublicwearealldoomed…” it goes on from there, usually with much more profanity and often abbreviated as, “we are all fucked” or “holy shit” or just one, extended, barbaric yawp. Perhaps this might better be termed the apocalyptic response to “how are you?”

The general nature of my own life occupies the next sphere. After all, other than the decline and fall of the American Republic, the personal events of this last year (with one or two exceptions) have astounded me with good fortune. Despite beginning the year with one of the three worst migraines of my migraine plagued life, which led to an MRI, which led to a month of fear that I had a brain tumor, I’ve seen several dreams come true this year. My book was published, it sits in a real bookstore right next to Carrie Fisher’s book (o.k., so I moved it there, but I didn’t move it but one shelf up), I’ve been on t.v., I’ve been to places that I’ve never seen before but have always wanted to visit, I hit the half-century mark and must say that I look damn good, I’ve done many things that might count toward my fifteen minutes of fame and have enjoyed the ride. I have my health, a job, tenure, a sabbatical (which is sadly almost at an end), and so many other things for which anyone in general could be happy and me in particular have no business enjoying and yet, here I am.

The final sphere lies deep down in the chemical infested subterranean swamp where the Gremlins live, chained up but alive.  You know about the Gremlins, right? I may have to save them for later. Indeed, I will. For now, know that I once thought that the Gremlins would all die with success, that each success might at least put them into a coma. Alas, this past month I have learned that success makes them angry. They have become pissed off and fly at me, much like the birds in The Birds, pecking and biting and screeching. Oh, the screeching!

I used to think that all I could do was chain them up and drug them. Now, I want them dead. Is that even possible? How does one get rid of Gremlins? When they plague you, you can do nothing in any other sphere.

My original intent for this blog was to sound my barbaric yawp. Then I did not. I thought, then, I might explore other voices. I started because my barbaric yawp sounded on Face Book. They are getting a little tired of my yawping there, and perhaps I need a longer form here, and perhaps I want to save the yawping. So, whatever may happen, why not? I’m a dreadfully inconsistent diarist, as well. Fortunately for posterity, I’m of no interest to them. So here is today’s Paranoid Delusion.

I have for some time been imagining a version of a Reichstag Fire: a manufactured disaster that can be used by an administration grasping for absolute power. This, in the dystopia novel in my head, would come sometime before the 2018 mid-term elections in order to provide an excuse to suspend said elections. Of course, that would be much too obvious. Something more insidious would happen, more subtle, and may already have. Then the news this morning.

I wrote:

U.S. recognizes Jerusalem as capital of Israel. Terrorist incidents against U.S. citizens increase to a 9/11-like incident or what might as well be a 9/11-like incident. More war-time powers granted to the executive. U.S. stands alone. In 2018 election, no candidate can win unless they are a complete hawk supporting massive increases in defense spending, thus justifying GOP tax plan and all that it will do. Chaos reigns. Chaos is a ladder. — Jeez, it’s not even 9 am yet. I really need to unplug because my sanity and my liver are at risk (for the record, I am NOT drinking at this hour).

By the time I returned home this evening, the first step had taken place. There was a reason that Mel Brooks called the anatgonists in Get Smart! KAOS. We seem to have all of the bad parts of the twentieth century concentrated into the past year, if not the past month.

Ah, but now we come to the Fourth Chapter. Alas, this is alas the final one about which I shall blog because the action leaves Florence and resumes in England while I moved on to Venice.

In the delightfully Victorian previous chapter, Lucy plays Beethoven triumphantly, making her “peevish” and unsettled with her insides churned. Mr. Beebe, through whose eyes we watch Lucy in that chapter, senses a sort of danger. “‘She oughtn’t really to go at all,’ said Mr. Beebe, as they watched her from the window, ‘and she knows it. I put it down to too much Beethoven.'”

(This is just a picture of the Duomo because I don’t get to pictures for a few paragraphs. The Duomo doesn’t figure into the story at all, but it is such a fixture of Florence that I felt compelled to include it somewhere.):

In these days of all sorts of bombastic music, not just rock but the type of music that has to blow your speakers out with every single note, not to mention the singer’s vocal chords, that last sentence has a different meaning. I realized it some time ago, when I lost my taste for all of the music that used to, well, make me feel like Lucy after Beethoven. I lay on the couch listening to something classical. Perhaps it was Beethoven, or maybe Vivaldi. Like Lucy, I have very predictable tastes. In any case, I realized that the lack of words and the layers of emotions that accompany classical music can stir corners of your being that you may not know exist, and do so in combinations that you don’t expect.

For Lucy, Forster’s description of her understanding of music and art suggests that she approaches it much the way I did rock music when I was her age. Any stirring was something. So her encounter with Beethoven would have been much like mine with the Allman Brothers or Bruce Springsteen or really anything that shuffled off the ennui of suburban teenaged life. You feel alive in the music and you want to bring that feeling into your life.

So, Lucy goes out alone into Florence, uncertain how to bring that feeling into being except by riding on the electric tram, which she had expressly promised not to do. Her thoughts rebel against the nonsense of behaving “ladylike” while in this state:

It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by a means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured , then despised, and finally ignored. Poems have been written to illustrate this point.

Rumination on this passage must wait for another post, possibly many, because, while utter bullshit, women still live with the vestiges of these constraints.  Obviously, this chapter stirs up much, and we aren’t even a full page into it.

As a pale substitute, Lucy defies propriety and purchases — gasp! — photographs of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” naked as a jaybird on the day she was born, as well as several others that include a naked boy, a woman breastfeeding a baby, the Della Robbia babies that she so admired, that “Assention of St. John” over which the Emersons debated, and some Madonnas.  “For her taste was catholic,” Forster comments, “and she extended uncritical approval to every well-known name.” We, of course, have already figured that out; and I find this painfully funny and familiar.

Then, the real action begins, just as she all but sings the chorus to the bored teenager’s lament, “‘Nothing ever happens to me.'” She enters the Piazza Signoria.

Through no coercion on my part or real intention beyond finding a comfortable, conveniently located, and reasonably priced room, we ended up staying on the Piazza Signoria. There, on the right, in the building with “Ristorante” on the ground floor, you can find our pensione. The piazza is now ringed with similar arrangements of ground floor dining and lodging above, with tchotcke booths near the Triton fountain. Tour groups come through like clockwork, pause in front of the Palazzo del Vecchio, snap pictures of the replica of David, and move on. Just as regularly, a horsedrawn carriage circles through. The horses wear little hoods to cover their ears so as not to become startled by all of the noise. As throughout the history of artists touring Florence, someone will forego the iPhone or iPad (or even the throwback camera) and study the statues on the loggia with pencil.

That is not me. Any drawing of my would be somewhat more abstract, perhaps even linear, if you catch my drift.

Lucy arrives at the palazzo in despair, her stirred soul disappointed, as the sun sets.

The great square was in shadow; the sunshine had come too late to strike it. Neptune was already insubstantial in the twilight, half god, half ghost, and his fountain plashed dreamily to the men and satyrs who idled together on its marge.

They were cleaning Triton, alas.

The Loggia showed as the triple entrance of a cave, wherein dwelt many a deity, shadowy, but immortal, looking forth upon the arrivals and departures of mankind. It was the hour of unreality — the hour, that is, when unfamiliar things are real. An older person at such an hour in such a place might think that sufficient was happening to him, and rest content. Lucy desired more.

She fixed her eyes wistfully on the tower of the palace, which rose out of the lower darkness like a pillar of roughened gold.

Then something did happen.

The tumbling baby brought the older Mr. Emerson into the scene. Both he and Lucy attempted to comfort the little tyke until his mother arrived. Once more, of course, Forster associates Lucy with babies, this one also breaking free from supervision. Lucy, now liberated from the influence of both Miss Lavish and Miss Bartlett, forms her own opinion of older Mr. Emerson (who I don’t believe ever receives a first name) and decides that she rather likes him and his son, George, for the time being.

Indeed, this thought begins to disturb her because “she was again conscious of some new idea, and was not sure whither it would lead her,” especially after George insists that she join the Emersons in the absence of Miss Lavish and her Baedeker. She tries to behave as she ought, turning coldly polite, but the older Mr. Emerson calls her on it. “‘You are pretending to be touchy; but you are not really'” he tells her, “‘Stop being so tiresome, and tell me instead what part of the church you want to see.” Thus, he forestalls what they call a “muddle” for the moment. Muddles are very significant in the story. They are that confusion between what you want and what you think you are supposed to want, like Lucy’s taste in art.

Lucy and the Emersons then make their way to her destination, the Giottos in the Peruzzi Chapel.

There, they run into the tiresome Rev. Eager. Stuffy Rev. Eager pontificated on the frescoes depicting the “Ascension of St. John” to a tour group that includes the elderly Miss Alan sisters from the Bertolini. He goes on and on about the church having been build with the strength of faith and his pronouncements that Giotto “is untroubled  by the snares of anatomy and perspective” because the depth of his feeling transcends such foolishness.

The older Mr. Emerson, “in much too loud a voice for church,” forever wins my admiration at this point by scoffing, “‘Built by faith indeed! That simply means the workmen weren’t paid properly. And as for the frescoes, I see no truth in them. Look at that fat man in blue! He must weigh as much as I do, and he is shooting into the sky like an air-balloon.'”

George disagrees. He prefers this mode of ascension, if such an ascension happened at all, because “‘I would rather go up to heaven by myself than be pushed by cherubs; and if I got there I should like my friends to lean out of it, just as thy do here.'”  I must concede George’s point. Cherubs annoy me, too. Cherubs, incidentally, seem to be more baby imagery. George also ponders the grave out of which St. John rises, signalling his own suicidal ideation.  He longs for an end to life while Forster associates Lucy with a beginning of life. Later, the older Mr. Emerson connects the two by referring to George as his baby whom he wishes would embrace life.

Their discourse, of course, offends the Rev. Eager, who has crossed theological swords with Mr. Emerson in the past. Now that I mention it, the crossed swords took place when George was, in fact, a baby. Eager insisted that an illness that George had suffered in infancy was punishment for his parents having not baptized him. Eager so worked on Mrs. Emerson, that she sank into a depression from guilt and died, seemingly from suicide. Mr. Emerson, then, had good reason to worry about his son, and Forster sets these pieces out here with the images of babies and graves and melancholy.

Meanwhile, Eager shuffles his crew out of the Peruzzi Chapel and into the next, which is filled with more Giottos, these depicting the death of St. Francis.

I just thought this guy was funny, as if he were saying, “get on with it already, Frank!”:

Mr. Emerson chases after them to apologize, leaving Lucy alone with George. She observes him as he paces the chapel.

For a young man his face was rugged, and — until the shadows fell upon it — hard. Enshadowed, it sprang into tenderness. She saw him once again at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, carrying a burden of acorns. Healthy and muscular, he yet gave her the feeling of greyness, of tragedy that might only find solution in the night.

I think when I first read this book, I responded to George’s depression because I felt it myself. He seems a bit older than Lucy, or at least his stage of life would have been mine when I graduated from college a few years after I read the book, and I would certainly have understood that feeling of wanting more, wanting life, wanting feeling despite having all of the comforts that any person could possibly need. That, in fact, was the point when I began to long to visit Italy. Forster conveys that futile sense of desperation here in George’s description.

What I did not see the first time through the book or even the times I saw the film was the sex. Here it is.  You have to go to images of the Sistine Chapel and look for the figure — or rather, figures — “carrying a burden of acorns.” They are the “Ignudi,” the nudes, muscular, wavy-haired, and beautiful, just the way Michelangelo liked them, who surround the main images of the Biblical stories. Although Lucy does not see the ceiling until later, off stage, while Cecil Vyse courts her, the seed — or acorn — has been planted here. The power of those nude male figures and the complexity of feeling elicited by George probably caused her muddle over Cecil in Rome when he proposed. How could she accept him with all of this sentiment so close to the surface? Only safely back home, ensconced in Windy Corners with no chance of ever seeing the Ignudi or the Emersons ever again could she consign herself to becoming the younger Mrs. Vyse.

Her skittishness emerges here, foreshadowing that silly yet dangerous engagement, when Mr. Emerson confronts her with George’s depression. He asks her to befriend the young man, to discover the source of his melancholy, and to help him find his way out. She retreats. The task is, perhaps, too much for her at this moment. After all, her own thoughts about George surprise her because, “it was unlike her to have entertained anything so subtle.” She lives life on the surface, uncertain of the depths even of her own self.  She turns to the familiar, suggests a hobby for George, turns catty about the Misses Alans, snaps at Mr. Emerson, and becomes an echo of Miss Bartlett, who appears as her deus ex machina and whom she trots off to join.

“‘Poor girl,'” laments older Mr. Emerson. “‘Poor girl.'”

Lucy and Miss Lavish finally arrive at Santa Croce.

There they spy the Emersons entering the church. Miss Lavish makes the comment that she “would like to set an examination paper at Dover and turn back every tourist who couldn’t pass it.”

I confess to sharing her feeling at times, such as when we ended up seated next to the American frat jerk who seemed perplexed as to why girls hated him just before launching into a slut-shaming story about a young woman who orally gratified him — but that is a story for another time. Actually, I’m more inclined in my grouchier moments to issue a set of guidelines about considerate behavior, but that is also a story for another time.

Back to Lucy and Miss Lavish.

Miss Lavish abandons Lucy as she darts after “my local-colour box.”  Lucy tarries outside in the square a bit, wishing she could remember which monastic order had built the church.

In her day, Lucy would have seen a statue of Dante in the middle of the plaza. That statue now stands next to the church entrance.

Very imposing!

Eventually, Lucy screws up the courage to enter the church on her own. Now, part of Lucy’s problem, with which I can wholly identify but don’t think I fully recognized the first time I read the book when I was much closer to Lucy’s age than the older Mr. Emerson’s, is that she finds herself caught between what she actually likes and what she is supposed to like. She knows that she likes the Della Roba babies in the Pallazza D’Annuziato and she knows that she like playing Beethoven sonatas triumphantly, but most other things she feels as if she ought to like in order to be cultured and sophisticated. That’s certainly how she reacts to the church. “Of course, it must be a wonderful building,'” she thinks,”‘But how like a barn! And how very cold!'”

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say the interior resembled a barn, I could see how the analogy might hold.

I also wished it were, in fact, cold since the weather outside had grown warm and we had been walking not quite so long as Lucy had, but for some time. Unlike people in Forster’s day, my definition of a cold interior has probably been affected by air conditioning.

Lucy assures herself that “of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto, in the presence of whose tactile values she was capable of feeling what was proper. But who was to tell her which they were?” Myself, I wasn’t all that interested in the Giottos because I had grown rather weary of religious subjects in paintings. One can only take so many annunciations and crucifixions, which seem to be the primary two subjects of Medieval and Renaissance art.

The main reason that I wanted to visit this church (outside of Jim Croce jokes) was, truth be told, to illustrate this blog as I did with Dracula and Whitby last year on Facebook. That Machiavelli was interred here had an added bonus for me not only as a site but also as a lure to convince my husband that this was a good place to visit. He hasn’t read Room With a View nor has he seen the movie in many years (although I could swear we watched it together not too many years ago).

In fact, I only knew that Machiavelli’s tomb lies in the church because of Lucy’s next encounter as she wanders about looking for the Giottos.

She beheld the horrible fate that overtook three Papists — two he-babies and a she-baby — who began their career by sousing each other with the Holy Water, and then proceeded to the Machiavelli memorial, dripping but hallowed. Advancing toward it very slowly and from immense distances, they touched the stone with their fingers, with their handkerchiefs, with their heads, and then retreated. What could this mean? They did it again and again. Then Lucy realized that they had mistaken Machiavelli for some saint, hoping to acquire virtue.

As for my husband, I managed to get him to the square for a drink in a cafe the day before in our own wanderings, then persuaded him that we should eat at one of the restaurants the next night. Meanwhile, I found information that informed me that — what do you know? — Michaelangelo,

(notice how the statue on the left has her own little sculpture)

Dante,

and Galileo

are also buried there. This all allowed me to entice him to visit the inside of the church. Once we got there, we discovered Da Vinci

and Marconi, although he would not have been there when Lucy visited.

As I read the novel before I trip, I did not entirely understand the next incident.

The smallest he-baby stumbled over one of the sepulchral slavs so much admired by Mr. Ruskin, and entangled his feet int he features of a recumbent bishop. Protestant as she was, Lucy darted forward. She was too late. He fell heavily upon the prelate’s upturned toes.

What was happening? Was the bishop lying down on the floor? Was he alive or dead? Lucy calls him “hateful” in the next paragraph, but to his face? He seemed to have been made of stone.

He was. She referred to one of these interesting slabs on the floor of the church on which the departed have been carved in relief.

Most are worn flat, as this one is; but they may not have been quite so worn in the early 20th century, or Forester could have taken a little dramatic license. So, too, a slight bump becomes a mountain to a small child.

I am still ignorant of the Ruskin to which Lucy refers repeatedly in the chapter. I suppose I could go look it up, but there never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do once you find them.