I woke up in a really foul mood this morning. It was a sort of Thomas Mann feeling, a slow-motion descent towards a silent lonely end.
It could have been the warm, sticky Siena night, uncooled in spite of the overhead fan that only succeeded in circulating the air within the stuffy room. The window facing the small rectangular courtyard three stories below provided no relief. It faced only on three other featureless brick walls.
Or maybe that foul mood came from reading the news in the early morning dawn of mid-June in Europe when it is too early to wake yet only a glimmer of hope exists that it might be possible to coax another hour or two out of a restless sleep. So you find something to do that isn't stimulating and might actually bore you enough to drop off again. Didn't work. I read the news. I wish the media would strip the names of nations and politicians out of their stories so I can believe what I want about whatever place, rather than take the current reality-series world as it is. Or better yet, I should just divorce myself from what's happening out there and not let it intrude on the business of walking.
Or it could have been yesterday's visit to the Sinagoga di Siena, a tired sad place, full of history and a lot of pain, serving a community of only fifty, the remaining Jewish citizens of Siena. After passing so many churches over the past almost 1,400 miles, visiting a fair number with Patrick, finding wonderful art in some and real comfort and meditative space in others, I thought it would be uplifting to experience my own tradition's places of worship. It wasn't uplifting at all. No person of the Jewish faith was permitted to work on the synagogue's restoration so the design and its implementation show no sense of the spiritual at all. It looks more like my childhood memories of my grandparents' late nineteenth century-era apartment on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn than a house of worship, a three dimensional plasterwork oval in the center of the ceiling, white on gray, a few plaster thunderbolts radiating across the ovoid's perimeter. The contrast between "church" and "synagogue" was way too stark, especially for one like me whose conception is that if there is a singular motivating force behind the infinite, He-She-It cannot possibly care in which tradition one honors it, whether it be a tradition of religion, the personally spiritual, or science. To be clear, in my conception, a science like cosmology is also a spiritual enterprise: dedicating one's life to the mysteries of the infinite, the secrets of creation.
Or the mood might have been for another reason. I know I was feeling the loneliness of waking on one's forty-sixth wedding anniversary, missing the one I should have been waking next to, cuddled in on a cooler, Northern California summer-is-winter morning where lingering against bare flesh brings a warmth that has nothing to do with physical temperature but everything to do with the only real meaningfulness of existence, the love of one whose life is symbiotically entwined with your own.
But I know that it was also the feeling I get every year approximately midway through these walks, when the thought arises of what a ridiculous conception it is for an almost sixty seven year old to trod hundreds or thousands of miles from some indistinct point A to another point B, no matter how celebrated, beautiful, and storied cities they may be. In the dead midway, there is no conception of Rome, only an objective to get there. I get this way every year at one point or another.
From Lucca to Altopascio to San Miniato Alto to Gambassi Terme to San Gimignano to Monteriggioni to Siena, the most recent steps of my journey, I've been suffering through temperatures in the high eighties and low nineties Fahrenheit. But I have also been thrilled by the actuality of the kind of Tuscan landscapes one readily imagines, the ochers, yellows, browns, and greens of dust filtered sunlight on hills, fields, and farmsteads. I've also engaged in meditations that come to mind unbidden, one in particular en route to San Gimignano that I need some time to unravel. Yet this morning in Siena I was in a foul mood.
The day improved, lightened by a smiling, young, bright-spirited Chiara, the guide on a walking tour Patrick and I took this morning. We decided to spend an extra day in Siena and Chiara expertly maneuvered seven German tourists and two pellegrini-cum-tourists through the Duomo and gave us background on works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Bernini, and others, escorted us through the medieval heart of Siena, and let us in on particulars and secrets of the current day Palio.
I felt even better after getting a shave at the shop of one Giuseppe Castigleone and better still when during an evening passeggiata I discovered that one of the hole-in-the wall restaurants I had passed while searching for Giuseppe's place, a short narrow restaurant that earlier in the day seemed more appropriate for a donner/kebob shop or a take away pizza place, had set tables on the street and was in fact an absolutely authentic osteria serving food da casa, all home made. It is hard to escape tourists in Siena, and there certainly were some of those strolling along the street, but here the primary foot traffic was Sienese returning home from work or taking places at the numerous other shops that transformed themselves into local eating haunts in the early evening.
By dinner's end, I was in a reasonably good frame of mind, until I climbed the fifty-seven steps back to my airless room for another restless night's sleep.
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