22 Nov The Magic of the Mundane
On a journey in Italy three Aprils ago, I took a train from Venice to Verona. As the suburbs trailed away, we moved into exquisite countryside of green rolling hills, terracotta-roofed houses, and spiring green cypress trees.
At one point I jotted in my journal: ‘’How the mundane becomes exotic in the traveler’s eye — broken-down farmhouses, everyday toolshed. ‘That old place?’ the locals would say. Embodiment of age and grace and simplicity — rock/brick construction. Older way of doing things. Lush green fields dotted with bright yellow and white blooms. Poplar-lined rivers.’’
Reading these words now, I’m transported back to that spring-fresh morning: the train humming through the blossoming countryside, the excitement of Italy all around, terraced fields and tended crops, and history incarnate in far-off hilltop castles and nearby cobblestone squares, chipped mosaic facades and straining bell-towers.
That’s one lesson: the way a scribble of sentences — just a few dozen words — can catapult you back into an entire scene: the contented chatter of a leather-swaddled mother and daughter on a shopping spree; the earthy intimacies of a young couple entwined like vines; the whiff of baroque perfume from a bescarfed and bejeweled matron; and aged, ageless Italy rolling by.
But the lesson I was thinking of that day was how the same building can be two very different things. Take the crumbling rock farmhouse that inspired those scribbles: a roof-less old edifice, three walls and a fourth open to the breeze, the weathered rocks tumbling and cracking, lying in shattered heaps by its side, weeds growing tall around it.
To the locals who pass it every day, this may be the municipal eyesore. When they gather over Amarones at the local cafe, they may grumble, ‘’Why doesn’t Luigi just tear the thing down? It’s a disgrace!’’
But to my wide eyes, it’s material metaphor: It imbues the landscape with grace and meaning — the honest everyday aspirations of the past, the farmers who worked the land for longer than I can imagine, the passing on of toil and traditions, the modulating rhythm of the seasons. It may be a ruin to the locals, but it’s a kind of rune to me.
Or that dilapidated toolshed, listing to one side, missing half of its timbers, but emblematic of a slower pace of life, and a gritty, callused education in nature’s whims and bounties.
I think of the mustard-colored, mud-and-stick-walled, thatched-roof farmhouses in rural Japan that enchant me, and of the toppling, paint-peeling, red country barns of my New England childhood. The mundane made exotic.
It’s easy to romanticize such things, and that’s not what I mean to do here. My feeble adventures in vegetable-growing have convinced me that I’d rather be the traveler eating the panini than the farmer growing the tomatoes, raising the pigs or making the mozzarella that goes into the treat.
What I mean to say is that what we see in the world around us depends on how we look. If we approach the pieces of our everyday puzzle — whether an Indonesian streetside stall or a crumbling Connecticut stone wall, laundry hung on a Peruvian clothesline or glass towers reflecting the Parisian sky — with the fresh mind of the outsider, we may find magic in the mundane. That scent of skewered chicken sizzling on a venerable brazier; how rocks weather into each other, adopting a grainy grace; the prayer flags of prim blue blouse and multi-patched work pants, billowing in the breeze; the sun-skewered cloud-shine of a city skyline.
I think again of that broken-down Italian farmhouse, no good for sheltering people or even storing grain anymore. Just an eyesore in the Italian countryside. Until you see it with a wondering mind.
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