Petrarch looked at Rome's ruins and saw time dissolving the self
For Petrarch, time was not just a backdrop: it destroys cities and ends empires, and it also changes and fragments us.
He saw that force at work in the ruins of Rome.
He often walked through Rome with his friend and patron Giovanni Colonna. Giovanni asked him to record the conversations they had, but Petrarch could not. His reason was that everything had changed.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
This is a useful antidote to the fantasy that returning to a place restores the person who first saw it. Petrarch wishes for the place, the idle mood, the day and the frame of mind he once had; the same thought has him feeling in constant flux.
Maybe the point is not nostalgia but instruction. The remedy offered is virtue: we never live while we are here except when, by performing some virtuous action, we pave our own road to the real life. The past is lost; the remedy is action.