perception of
doors. These are the ones that first caught my eye. They’re in Roseto Valfortore, a small village in southern Italy that’s been subject to repeated waves of emigration over the past century and a half. The houses were built to last, and many have outlasted their use. Few people remain.
One of Janus’s faces looked forward and out; the other looked back and inward. He governed liminality itself: transitions, gates, passages, frames, beginnings, endings, time. If the gods of Ancient Rome had survived through today, he’d be the god of a bleary airport pint. He’d be the god of the hard plastic chairs I sat in at the hospice, and of the cuts that TV shows make from their cold opens.
Even the word liminality is Janusian. It derives from the latin word limen, or threshold. So many thresholds are constructs, rather than constructions: border after border, imaginary boundaries of imagined communities, scrolling away from under me as I sat gawking from various trains. My long slow journey never really ended; I completed in a month one languorous loop, both immersed and removed from the places I explored.
I completed most of my trip alone. It’s how I like to travel. I like being free to walk a half marathon round Rome, or to spend hours counting pennies at a numismatic museum, as I did years previously in Athens. You meet a lot of interesting people when you’re alone, or at least when you look outward: people look back, and they smile, and they invite you in.
There are more daunting people, too. I was followed in a park by a man who wouldn’t leave until I gave him my number, and who then walked me back to a hotel that I pretended was my friend’s. He wasn’t fooled, and showed up there the next day–thankfully, after I’d already left.
Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say №1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say №3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door №2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? (x)
I wouldn’t switch. I wouldn’t even choose. I would lie on the bristling carpet forever, boneless, listening to the rattle one room over and counting the pauses between breaths.
They should let you flip the coins at the numismatic museum. They should exhibit one that spins forever in the air. Its two faces should merge to a shine-edged blur, each on constant display as it pins its audience in a moment, as it refuses to resolve to a head or tail that might start the match, or settle the question.
One wave of Roseto’s deserters set up camp in Pennsylvania, in an area they also dubbed Roseto. They came to work the slate quarries, and did not die at the same rate as their American counterparts. The Roseto effect was coined by Stephen Wolf, whose 50 year study comparing Bangor and Roseto suggested, he believed, that social cohesion saved lives. Indeed, as Rosetans integrated further, and the community disintegrated, heart attacks in this second Roseto rose.
When Roseto’s emigrants closed their doors, they made it permanent. They had to. Though they brought their place name with them, and for a while their community and habits, most of them would never again climb the crookback mountain roads to their former home. Today their descendants–the ones with means to do so, anyway–fly over to find their roots. Behind the doors their families closed forever, they find that life was bleak and hard to live (and the cell service was terrible. 2 stars). More visit every year.
In dreams, I loop chains lovingly around a handle. I snick padlocks into place like Christmas baubles. Janus watches me–for surely he must be the god of dreams, as well. He says: how secure; how well-defended. He frowns at himself and says: she’s still dreaming of the door. When you create a ghost town, you invite a haunting, I suppose.
All I know is that I’m obsessed with–