A twitch upon the thread

The famous Italian countryside rushes past at two hundred kilometers per hour. Here it’s less the idealized rolling hills and vineyards of Umbria or Tuscany and more cultivated farmland. As if Kentucky had thousand year old farmhouses and medieval watchtowers atop the hills. The mountains, ever to the east and distant from Gricignano, grow ever closer. I blast directly through one and my ears can feel the weight.

In Naples the mountains you see over the water are on the Amalfi coast. We’ll go there soon. But the peaks I can see have a literal blanket of cloud wrapping around the top of them. I can almost feel the soft fabric of the cloud, draped like a snuggie over the invisible, snow-covered mountaintops. I wonder how tall they are, from what height they look down at the world. When the blanket shifts, and as I draw closer, I can see that it’s not all that high, after all. But I still wonder…

There’s snow nearly all the way down these mountains. If I was a few hundred feet taller than I am, perhaps I’d have snow in my hair now, too. It’s January, and I know that not far above Rome snow is actually falling on the ground.

As I watch the small towns flit by, I write in my notebook, “Every town is brimming with secrets, every mountain begs me to climb.” But I stop, because I’m not sure if that’s true of if it’s just mysterious-sounding claptrap. I’m an ant, who today scurries about the ground and tomorrow lies shriveled on his back, and if I’d rather an ant not climb me. And are these towns more mysterious to me because they’re Italian? I didn’t think the same when I drove through Kentucky less than a month ago.

My mind drifts back about nine years, when I was on a train to Rome with Peter, Erin and Laura. Am I laden with more answers, more blinders than I was nearly a decade ago? Has my experience these years—getting married, serving in the Navy, having a child, acquiring the numerous possessions and habits that come with having a stable home—made me more or less receptive than I was as a boy?

Time passes, and this countryside doesn’t change much. I change, though. We change. I’m facing backward on the train, which gives me a feeling of being sucked along at these incredible speeds. I’m being sucked towards Rome.

There’s a story in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (which also serves as source material for this blog’s name) that talks about a man whom God has caught “with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

Is it the twitch upon my thread I feel as night falls and the train sucks me, sucks me toward Rome?