his heart bared to God. There are times when the inexpressiveness
of life comes near to overwhelming me, when it seems to me we are all
asleep or entranced, and but a little way above the still cows who stand
munching slowly in a field. Why couldn't we and why didn't we talk
together?... We fear bathos too much, are shyly decent to the pitch of
mania. We have neither the courage of our bodies nor of our souls....

I went almost immediately to Rome. I stayed in Rome some days, getting
together an outfit, and incidentally seeing that greater city of the
dead in whose embrace the modern city lies. I was now becoming
interested in things outside my grooves, though my grooves were still
there, deep and receptive, and I went about the place at last almost
eagerly, tracing the outlines of that great departed city on whose
colossal bones the churches and palaces of the middle ages cluster like
weeds in the spaces and ruins of a magnificent garden. I found myself
one day in the Forum, thinking of that imperialism that had built the
Basilica of Julius Caesar, and comparing its cramped vestiges with that
vaster second administrative effort which has left the world the
monstrous arches of Constantine. I sat down over against these last
among the ruins of the Vestals' House, and mused on that later
reconstruction when the Empire, with its science aborted and its
literature and philosophy shrivelled to nothing, its social fabric
ruined by the extravagances of financial adventure and its honor and
patriotism altogether dead, united itself, in a desperate effort to
continue, with all that was most bickeringly intolerant and destructive
in Christianity--only to achieve one common vast decay. All Europe to
this day is little more than the sequel to that failure. It is the Roman
Empire in disintegration. The very churches whose domes rise to the
northward of the ancient remains are built of looted stones and look
like parasitic and fungoid growths, and the tourists stream through
those spaces day by day, stare at the marble fragments, the arches, the
fallen carvings and rich capitals, with nothing greater in their minds
and nothing clearer....

I discovered I was putting all this into the form of a letter to Mary.
I was writing to her in my mind, as many people talk to themselves. And
I remember that I wandered upon the Palatine Hill musing over the idea
of writing a long letter to her, a long continuous letter to her, a sort
of diary of