This is the second time that I am reading Eat Pray and Love in the last one year. What I got out of the book six months back is very different than what I am being able to take away now. Maybe it is evolution of mind and the beauty of transient thinking that gives you a new meaning every day. I loved the foll excerpt from (page 74-75) eat pray and love:
On my way back home I take a little detour and stop at the address in Rome I find most strangely affecting- the Augusteum. The big, round, ruined pile of brick started life as a glorious mausoleum, built by Octavian Augustus to house his remains and the remains of his family for all of eternity. It must have been impossible for the Emperor to have imagined at the time that Rome would ever be anything but a mighty Augustus- worshipping empire. How could he have possibly forseen the collapse of the realm? Or known that, with all the aqueducts destroyed by barbarians and with the great roads left in ruin, the city would empty of citizens, and it would take almost twenty centuries before Rome ever recovered the population she had boasted during her height of glory?
Augustus’s mausoleum fell to ruins and thieves during the Dark Ages. Somebody stole the emperor’s ashes- no telling who. By the twelfth century, though, the monument had been renovated into a fortress for the powerful Colonna family, to protect tem from assaults of various warring princes. Then the Augustus was transformed somehow into a vineyard, then a Renaissance garden, then a bullring, then a fireworks depository, then a concert hall. In 1930s, Mussolini siezed the property and restored it down to it’s classical foundations, so that it could someday be the final resting place for his remains. (Again, it must have been impossible back then to imagine that Rome could ever be anything but a Mussolini- worshipping empire.) Of course, Mussolini’s fascist dream did not last, nor did he get the imperial burial that he had anticipated.
Today the Augusteum is one of the quietest and lonliest places in Rome, buried deep in the ground. The city has grown up around it over the centuries. Traffic above the monument spins in a hectic circle, and nobody ever goes down there- from what I can tell- except to use the place as a public bathroom. But the building still exists, holding its Roman ground with dignity, waiting for the next incarnation.
I find the endurance of the augusteum so reassuring, that this structure has had such an erratic career, yet always adjusted to the particular wildness of the times. To me, the Augusteum is like a person who’s led a totally crazy life- who maybe started out as a housewife, then unexpectedly became a widow, then took up fan dancing to make money, ended up somehow as the first female dentist in outer space, then tried her hand at national politics- yet who has managed to hold an intact sense of herself throughout the upheaval.
I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The augteum warns me never to get attached to any obsolete idea about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday, I may have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough- but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the eternal city, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
I have loved reading this small excerpt from the book. We sometimes get so attached to our past ‘who we were’ and want to keep it as a living edifice of our so called glorified existence. Existence is today, now or never. Our past glories cannot make us dignified, respectable and lovable. Times are never equanimous, we are not what we were or what we could have been. We are today- we are now.
Thinking Thoughts 