#001: Thoughts on time and place, finding peace

September 18, 2023

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a novel I picked up in London last summer, Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City. Translated from its native Italian, it’s a gorgeous book that makes you want to learn the language in which it was originally written. It’s both a delicious love letter to 1960s Rome and an equally devastating portrait of a young man coming undone. Lonely Leo Gazzara lives most of his life in drunken stupor, aimlessly bouncing between bars, uninspiring jobs, and female companions. The story toggles back and forth between Leo’s jaunts in the city and his brief escapes to the seaside. 

Perhaps it’s my current rediscovery of Los Angeles or my predilection for analyzing the romance of a particular time and place that explains why this story has infatuated me once again. I think I was compelled when I originally read the book because I had visited Rome a couple months prior. Isn’t it truly marvelous when words perfectly capture the essence of a place? I would be remiss if I didn’t include an excerpt here:

“Rome was our city, she tolerated us, flattered us, and even I ended up realizing that in spite of the sporadic work, the weeks when I went hungry, the damp, dark hotel rooms with their yellowing furniture squeaking as if killed and desiccated by some obscure liver disease, I couldn’t live anywhere else. And yet, when I think back on those years, I have clear memories of a small number of places, a small number of events, because Rome by her very nature has a particular intoxication that wipes out memory. She’s not so much a city as a wild beast hidden in some secret part of you. There can be no half measures with her, either she’s the love of your life or you have to leave her, because that’s what the tender beast demands, to be loved. That’s the only entrance toll you’ll have to pay from wherever you’ve come, from the green, hilly roads of the south, or the straight, seesawing roads of the north, or the depths of your own soul. If she’s loved, she’ll give herself to you whichever way you want her, all you need to do is go with the flow and you’ll be within reach of the happiness you deserve. You’ll have summer evenings glittering with lights, vibrant spring mornings, café tablecloths ruffled by the wind like girls’ skirts, keen winters, and endless autumns, where she’ll seem vulnerable, sick, weary, swollen with shredded leaves that are silent underfoot. You’ll have dazzling white steps, noisy fountains, ruined temples, and the nocturnal silence of the dispossessed, until time loses all meaning, apart from the banal aim of keeping the clock hands turning. In this way you too, waiting day after day, will become part of her. You too will nourish the city. Until one sunny day, sniffing the wind from the sea and looking up at the sky, you’ll realize there’s nothing left to wait for.”

Rather ironically, I also remember feeling a strange kinship to Leo. I wasn’t fully aware of it last summer, and beyond the similarities of age (both of us are thirty), I too felt trapped by a fervent sense of isolation. A stubborn inertia takes hold when you know you have abandoned yourself, again and again. Fast forward to this summer which for the most part was spent under an inescapable fog, I relinquished all control to a blinding and intense sadness masquerading as pride. For the first time in my adult life, I had no one to hide behind. No one to derive value from. I could no longer be defined by my relationship to anyone else. This was both freeing and unnerving. 

Then suddenly this past week arrived and it was infused with a magic specific to California, and all I could feel was overwhelming gratitude. The glorious light and unlimited expanse of blue remains the same, but there’s the faintest, most welcome chill in the air. As if the Santa Anas are soon to announce themselves. I may not be a stranger because I’ve called this city home for most of my life, but it’s been a long time since I’ve stuck around long enough to experience Los Angeles as she changes seasons. And it’s like we’re meeting each other for the first time. I’m greeting an old friend as a wholly new person. When the last of the August heat cleared, the lazy haze that followed me around all summer also lifted and the loneliness I felt turned into peace. A satisfaction in just existing. A self-assuredness that only comes when you give yourself enough space to just be.

While Leo fears being in a city so overwhelmingly plagued by history, it brings to mind my own fears that had me avoiding returning to my hometown for many years. Not a place known for history on such a grand scale, but overrun with personal history. I remember the fraught time after my college graduation in which I avoided coming back to LA and shortly thereafter I met the man that eventually became my husband. Eight years later, here I am and there’s no other place I’d rather be. Good orderly direction.

Naturally, I think of Didion because she is the preeminent voice of California:

“I think people who grew up in California have more tolerance for apocalyptic notions. However, mixed up with this tolerance for apocalyptic notions in which the world is going to end dramatically is this belief that the world can’t help but get better and better. It’s really hard for me to believe that everything doesn’t improve, because thinking like that was just so much a part of being in California.”

I’m reminded I’m very much of and from this place. And I can’t help but know that things will only get better because I’m home.