A shower of nouns
Virginia Woolf argued that life does not unfold like the neat plot of a novel. Instead, she said, life comes to us as “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms,” an endless series of impressions that are different for every person.
I think of Woolf’s shower of atoms on Sunday mornings in Rome, where my family is living this year. For me, newly arrived with my rusty Italian, going to church is like standing in a shower of nouns. The rest of the grammar flows past me so quickly that my ears and brain can’t keep up. But I catch many of the nouns: pace, giustizia, misericordia. Syria. Burkina Faso. Libya. I bambini, i poveri, la creazione.
My favorite church in Rome is Santa Maria in Trastevere, which faces onto a piazza where the life of the church and the life going on all around it are one life. Children and street performers, priests and congregants, tourists and beggars and pilgrims mingle. And through it all runs the music of the fountain: water over water over stone.
