OT: seeing again and again

9 years ago

It has been so hot here lately, making the outdoors, where ordinarily I spend much of my time, best avoided, that yesterday I went on a day trip to Parma, the next city over from our provincial capital of Piacenza. Parma has a good art museum and some very fine churches, viewing them providing my main amusement. So I saw the well-known Renaissance Chiesa della Steccata, looking actually a bit over-stuffed to my eyes, then sat for a while in a Baroque one that was very pleasant, even if its cheerful frescoes weren't of the very first order, and last, before heading over to the art museum, I popped into the "Duomo", the cathedral. I must somehow never have visited it before, because when I saw the interior my head nearly exploded. It's an amazing church. The original building is Romanesque, and the frescoes in the dome are by Correggio, and there's much, much more, but I can't offer any details because images are whirling in my head as if I had made a brief journey into Paradise, had a look around, and then come home again. It's all confused. I spent about an hour there, and in that time wasn't able even to get a decent first look at everything worth looking at. It will take many, many visits before I can start to get some kind of idea of what I'm seeing.

So what this is all about is the importance, not only of seeing things, but of seeing them many times. Happy is the art-loving mortal who gets to visit the Prado or the Kunsthistorisches Museum or the National Gallery and spend a day there. Hugely happier is he or she who can return over and over, for days or years, to study, feel, a way into the richness of the works, and learn to be at home in place where they live. This is true for books, which I re-read, I imagine it's true for music, and--here this gets relevant to a forum on old roses--it applies to the natural world and to gardens.

If a visitor sees a garden once, they can see something beautiful and noteworthy, but if they see it repeatedly they have a different experience. The second, third, tenth time I walk through a meadow or stretch of woods, I notice plants and aspects and details of plants I didn't before. It takes time to absorb things. This is aside from seasonal change, which demands time as well, and is aside from the element of expectation, almost entirely confined to the gardener, who hangs reverently over buds and shoots while the visitor wants full bloom.

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Comments (5)

cathz6
9 years ago
last modified: 9 years ago
Beautiful post, Melissa. I remember seeing Chartres Cathedral ( many years ago) with its flying buttresses and all the beautiful blues in the stained glass windows and the story of how the windows were preserved by being buried before World War II came to that part of France. But the part that was usually ignored, the romanesque section, had the greatest impact because of its great age and serene simplicity.

Cath
Melissa Northern Italy zone 8 thanked cathz6
ingrid_vc so. CA zone 9
9 years ago
'A great post, Melissa, with something to ponder. We're so inundated by endless numbers of images that we feel we have no time to look at anything more than once; something new is always beckoning in the wings. We skim the surface of everything and feel deeply about nothing. It's one of the negatives for me about the internet. That doesn't mean we can't all consciously force ourselves to slow down and look, and then look again and again.
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Melissa Northern Italy zone 8
Original Author
9 years ago
Ingrid, we're the first humans in the history of the world who, on a large scale, enjoy such wealth and so many opportunities that we have to select from them. Two hundred years ago, a lucky household had a handful of books. When I was a child, we had three television stations. I'm not talking here about basic financial stability, which is another matter. But in terms of what we can see and listen to, nowadays we have this huge richness, and we have to choose. I realized a good many years ago that I would never be able to read all the good books or see all the good films, and so on. I also knew that, for me, re-reading and re-looking have a value. In the case of books, which I'm particularly familiar with, if the book is a good one, the first reading is only the first reading, to find out what happens. After I get that over with, I return for a more leisurely consideration of style, characterization, plot construction, and all the other elements that make a good book. The same for pictures: I go and live with them. I hope you'll be able to slow down, turn away from the latest siren call, and look, and look again.
Cassandra Wright (6b PA)
9 years ago
Thank you for this. I don't post often as I have four children under seven but I always read. This is close to my heart. We are in our mid-thirties and moved about a year ago. I left many roses behind (including a 30 ft Peggy Martin trained on our chimney that will probably swallow that little house now that I'm not there to prune it) but I dug many and brought them here, to what we hope will be our home for the rest of our lives. It is a discipline to stay in one place, to look again and again. Amend the soil, dig out the plants that spoil the scene and plant something you plan to tend for decades.

This is the garden I have the privilege of caring for. I might look around and wish for less humidity, changes in elevation, better soil, that the Norway maple in the back were a mature Cedar of Lebenon (haha) but ultimately no place is perfect and there is something rich in a commitment to a particular piece of earth with both it's flaws and occasional moments of beauty. There is so much in our gardens that isn't quite how we want it to be. The rabbits, the mildew, the weak rootstock. The picture is never quite finished but I am happy to know that I can look and look again instead of paying admission and moving on.
Anna-Lyssa Zone9
9 years ago
What a truly beautiful post Melissa. It feels like a priviledge to read these things you write.

Cassandra, your comment is also very moving... the sense of commitment to "a particular piece of earth" and really looking and looking again at it, knowing it intimately and finding joy in it..... reading this thread feels like meeting up with kindred spirits.