When people ask me what I saw when I went to England, I say, “Oh, the usual – Stonehenge, Buckingham Palace, the Sistine Chapel.”  When D’s aunt told us not to make any plans for Wednesday, that she had a special surprise for us, none of us could have guessed we’d be taking a day trip to Rome.

Ever since I read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, my thoughts of Rome have centered on one thing — Michelangelo’s Pietà — and though we saw so many things, this was the one that mattered to me. A student of philosophy, I’m more into Greece than I am Rome, but this image of a mother holding her dead son whose body has just undergone untold torture, this is something I can feel passionate about. It’s the juxtaposition of humanity and inhumanity, the universal love of a mother for her child.

For similar reasons, my favorite story from ancient Greece is that of Medea, a woman so scorned, so powerless that she takes the lives of her own children.  It’s the one thing she can do to hurt Jason, who has left her for a younger woman, and her need to hurt him surpasses her need to protect her children.  But she is cursed, for she must live with her choice and her own loss, magnified in this act of desperation.

Back in England, we caught a few scenes from Ordinary People on the television, yet another tale of a mother dealing with the death of her son.  We saw only one scene with the mother, and if you didn’t know what the story was about, you’d just think the mother was a bitch and write her off.  But knowing, as she lashes out at her remaining son, you can see her pain and know how deep her loss has cut her.

Ave Maria.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Continental Europe, UK and Ireland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.