Buonanotte.

POST-SCRIPT

July 6, 2000 -- Haddonfield, NJ, USA, 7:33 AM

One assumes--must assume--that time is stagnant. Everything except the here and now (in which we must believe) is frozen: above the Prague Hrad a crescent moon hangs suspended, a golden dusk filtering through the post-rain dew; the Vltava pauses with its tongue in mid-lap at the knees of the Charles Bridge; twentysomething patrons of the dark internetová kavárna in the wall of a Czech open-air mall stop in mid, thought, their fingers about to drop on the complicated Czech-or-English keyboards; the Indian waiter on Parizská Ulicé laughs as Celina is confronted with a belligerent samosa; the street violinist with short blond hair has her eyes closed, her case mostly full of crowns, her bow just at the frog in the middle of Air on the G String; a puzzled waiter holds his ladle at 45 degrees over a customer's bowl, not understanding that she won't eat meat; bored store clerks and vendors at booths along the Staremestké Námesti mouth clusters of consonants at uncomprehending tourists; in St. Nicholas Church, a double scene: Mozart's friend splay the requiem for his death, the small string section of the Praga Sinfonietta bow synchronously the frozen fugue of Brandenburg 3. In Florence, vendors at the bazaar try forever to convince tourists that theirs is the best leather, best silk, best paper in Italy; gelaterias with their doors wide open onto the cobblestone streets sit, their ice cream in mounds above bins labelled "tiramisů," "fragola," "nocciola"; the four hundred and sixty-three steps of the Duomo wind interminably up; Michaelangelos line the piazza outside the Uffizi, Bocaccios its passages within; Joel, Richard, Olivia and I sit in the sedate Trattoria Guelfa, a carafe of the house vino rosso between us, speaking in two languages, taking pranzo the Italian way. In Rome, gypsies sell postcards (20 for L. 2.000!) and gladiators in plastic muscle suits parade around the Colosseum; chunks of exhausted tourists shuffle their fanny-packed and video-cameraed way from historical site to historical site under the intense Roman sun, needing to see everything before they return; coins fly suspended over shoulders to Poseidon's feet into the waters of the Trevi fountain; the Pope blesses thousands of pilgrims in Latin red IUBILEO 2000 hats thronging at the base of St. Peter's basilica; tired Romans ride the graffitied metro between the Spanish Steps and Egyptian pyramids and columns from Carthage, via elephant; again a quiet side street opposite the Pantheon holds a double view, the first of me and my mother eating real Italian pizza four years ago, the second of four PYO-weary orchestra members and an equally-tired chaperone enjoying the first sanity of the day in the form of chocolate mousse and cappuccino. On all the autostrade of Italy, two tourbuses full of an exhausted orchestra wheel endlessly.

One must freeze time like this, suspend belief, suspend it in a glass and frame it in a context, and put the new window into a wall in one's house. But as I write this, jetlagged in New Jersey, the pickpockets still look covetously at purses on the Ponte Vecchio; the little Israeli felafel-and-pizza shop in the Old Town in Prague is selling more lunch to more tourists; people in period costume still flock around the square advertising three, four, five different performances per evening, and taxi drivers still roar by the Colosseum on the highway Mussolini built, gradually shaking it down. Time is as liquid and flowing as the Vltava, as the Arno. It runs parallel in the Czech Republic and New Jersey, in Italy and Wisconsin. I have essayed to freeze chuns of it, in four or five rolls of film, in vignettes, in journal entries, but how valid is any of this when it shall recur over and over an ocean away, past when I have breath to record it? Einmal ist keinmal--I'll be back.