Eat, Pray, Love Italian Style

An italian/american friend sent me this excerpt from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, so here goes String of Excerpts # 10. Send yours in....

I need to make some friends. So I got busy with it, and now it is October and I have a nice assortment of them. I know two Elizabeths in Rome now, besides myself. Both are American, both are writers. The first Elizabeth is a novelist and the second Elizabeth is a food writer. With an apartment in Rome, a house in Umbria, an Italian husband and a job that requires her to travel around Italy eating food and writing about it for Gourmet, it appears that the second Elizabeth must have saved a lot of orphans from drowning during a previous lifetime. Unsurprisingly she knows all the best places to eat in Rome, including a gelateria that serves a frozen rice pudding (and if they don't serve this kind of thing in heaven, then I really don't want to go there)...
    Of course, by now I've also made friends with Gionvanni and Dario, my Tandem Language Exchange fantasy twins. Giovanni's sweetness, in my opinion, makes him a national treasure of Italy. He endeared himself to me forever the first night we met, when I was getting frustrated with my inability to find the words I wanted in Italian, and he put his hand on my arm and said, "Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new." Sometimes I feel like he's older than me, what with his solemn brow and his philosophy degree and his serious political opinions. I like to try to make him laugh, but Giovanni doesn't always get my jokes. Humor is hard to catch in a second language. Especially when you're as serious a young man as Giovanni. He said to me the other night, "When you are ironic, I am always behind you. I am slower. It is like you are the lightening and I am the thunder."
    And I thought, Yeah baby! And you are the magnet and I am the steel! Bring to me your leather, take from me my lace!
    But still, he has not kissed me.
    I don't very often see Dario, the other twin, though he does spend a lot of his time with Sofie. Sofie is my best friend from my language class, and she's definitely somebody you'd want to spend your time with, too, if you were Dario. Sofie is Swedish and in her late twenties and so damn cute you could put her on a hook and use her as bait to catch men of all different nationalities and ages...Every day after class, Sofie and I go sit by the Tiber, eating our gelato and studying with each other. You can't even rightly call it "studying," the thing that we do. It's more like a shared relishing of the Italian language, an almost worshipful ritual, and we're always offering each other new wonderful idioms. Like, for instance, we just learned the other day that un'amica stretta means "a close friend." But stretta literally means tight, as in clothing, like a tight skirt. So a close friend, in Italian, is one that you can wear tightly, snug against your skin, and that is what my little Swedish friend Sofie is becoming to me.
    At the beginning, I liked to think that Sofie and I looked like sisters. Then we were taking a taxi through Rome the other day and the guy driving the cab asked if Sofie was my daughter. Now, folks--the girl is only about seven years younger than I am. My mind went into such a spin-control mode, trying to explain away what he'd said. But no, He said daughter and he meant daughter. Oh , what can I say? I've been through a lot in the last few years. I must look so beat-up and old after this divorce. But as that old country-western song out of Texas goes, "I've been screwed and sued and tattoed, and I'm still standin here in front of you..."

Comments

[Ana]

I like your “book excerpts game”, it always makes me smile or reflect to go back to a book I’ve read and re-read marked paragraphs. I’ve read “Eat, pray and love” during one of my many attempts to try learning meditation, by curiousity about the experience of the author in India. Here is one paragraph I’ve marked (page 145):

I like it when science and devotion find places of intersection. I found an article in The New York Times about a team of neurologists who had wired up a volunteer Tibetan monk for experimental brain-scanning. They wanted to see what happens to a transcendent mind, scientifically speaking, during moments of enlightenment. In the mind of a normal thinking person, an electrical storm of thoughts and impulses whirls constantly, registering on a brain scan as yellow and red flashes. The more angry or impassioned the subject becomes, the hotter and deeper those red flashes burn. But mystics across time and cultures have all described a stilling of the brain during meditation and say that the ultimate union with God is a blue light which they can feel radiating from the center of their skulls. Sure enough, this Tibetan monk, monitored during meditation, was able to quiet his mind so completely that no red or yellow flashes could be seen.

I guess I marked this paragraph because I’m always surprised and troubled by the “storm of thoughts that whirl my mind” when trying to meditate. But, after all, this paragraph confirms that I'm a normal thinking person. I may need a trip to India --like the author-- to be able to stop the yellow and red flashes ….