Juxtapositions

I suppose one of the things I like most about Venice, and about most cities, really, are the infinite juxtapositions they offer. In Venice, as above, you find textures and colors and shapes, laundry and saints, roof tiles and shutters.

Nature offers its own juxtapositions, of course, as in a forest, but it's in the cramped environment of Venice (and other cities) that I'm most reminded of the essentially interdependent nature of human life--no matter how vigorously American fabulists of "rugged individualism" and latter-day Thatcherites (she who famously declared "there is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women, and there are families") insist otherwise.

Our process of moving in is progressing slowly but fairly steadily. The 200-year-old table contained in this apartment, which I'd looked forward to using as my desk, had to be treated for termites and will require some time to air out. In the long scale of time we've now entered into in our new-to-us but very old apartment, this delay--no matter how long it extends--will figure as but a blink of the eye.