Song Of Myself

Yep, it's all over. This is my last blog entry. I have to say this was a great experience. Week after week it makes you recap the previous seven days and order your thoughts. Of course this was extremely helpful in Italy. I've looked back (here and there) to those old blogs written in Rome and it brings back an almost infinite amount of memories. It's not just the places and events that I remember, but the general mood pervading the particular blog entry. I don't know if I effectively captured that essence for you, the reader. I mean I remember it personally. I just hope you see Italy in a different light now, too. Allow me to expand on this thought:

What really made this such a good experience (both in Italy and back here in Columbus) is that I was able to write down what I was feeling in "the moment"--whether that be post-Oktoberfest or post-Rolling Stones documentary. There is an immediacy to the blogs entries--a hasty attempt to carve coherent thoughts onto the page before they become lost in the gray ocean of general memory. For instance, I don't remember just the Rembrandt museum in Amsterdam; I remember convincing one of my more gullible roomates that Rembrandt was named after the toothpaste. This is something I probably wouldn't have recalled. By remembering these seemingly trival details, though, entire events are opened up--other seemingly trival ones that, in the end, are quite significant. If the famous cities and monuments are the main skeletal structure of memory than these small comical events with friends are the marrow that make such events worth remembering. I hope that makes sense.

In many ways, this blog was a song of myself. So I'd like to leave you with the end of a famous Walt Whitman poem, "Song of Myself LII." Thanks to all of you who have read this over the past 9 months or so, espeically my family (the Constant Readers).

"Song of Myself LII"

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.