Sicily 6/16/24
I’ve had my first bad days here. Not that anything bad happened, only the tragedy of acclimation. Since Thursday afternoon I’ve been up in the hills, and since last night there have been rally cars racing through the area, though I don’t know why. Paolo* knocked at my door to invite me to watch them, but I gave a stern Non mi piace, and it was Giro’s invitation to sit at the intersection with some other neighbors and watch them go by, again and again, that got me outside. He gave me a basket of oranges yesterday at his orto, where he and his wife were also pruning the orange tree, and some zucchini and cucumber, so I couldn’t say no. But I was in a terrible mood to begin with, there’s nothing more boring to me than cars, and the relentless noise all across the valley has been driving me up the wall.
Why is acclimation a tragedy? The return of the mundane.
A long, distressing dream, about over-promising and not having enough resources, woke me at 3:00 a.m. To distract myself from the unconscious, I decided to light the fire in the stove and cook the pot of beans and rice I had soaking in the big pot. I got the fire started on the first try and fed it steadily until a remarkably hot bed of embers had formed. Still, it was 5:00 a.m. before I salted the pot, stirred it, put in the last of the wood, and went back to sleep while the beans finished cooking. When I got out of bed three hours later, the ashes were cooling and I had a warm breakfast ready.
I think that some of the pain of what I am calling mundanity, is lack of familiarity with a less regulated flow of time. I am accustomed to regulating time with stimulants, screens, people, acquisition, and busyness. Subsisting largely on beans and rice, salt and olive oil, often forgetting to make coffee until an hour into the morning, having made it two weeks without nicotine, having grown used to cold sponge baths, firewood and forest springs, the burden of challenge here has shifted from activity back to thought. As time-regulating activity fades away because there is no real purpose to it up here in the village, and indeed my goal is for it to fade away, life seems terribly mundane, because I don’t, in fact, really know what to do without it.
So I writhe, and mope, and lay on the bed trying to nap, and read old message threads, and eat some beans out of the pot, and angrily pine over my lost love, and drag myself to the spring though I don’t need water tonight, but strangely, none of it is genuinely attached to desire for anything. I don’t want any of what I don’t have. I want that indefinable other thing, which exists somewhere underneath the petty, actually mundane habits of the American city dweller.
At the very least, being here in Sicily takes away the question of why I exist, why life exists, being surrounded by so many living things in harmony with their environment: life exists in order to express the harmony of existence. It’s a different question that plagues me, which is what to do. Why don’t I have an answer to this? Why am I so determined, why have I come all this way, to look for an answer to this?
Thank God, the rally cars have stopped as the sun sets, peace has returned to the hills and the only sound is the rustling elderberry tree.
*Name has been changed. The neighborhood boy.