npverni · April 4, 2013 20:48
diff --git a/gistfile1.txt b/gistfile1.txt
 ll by ourselves alone

 By Roger Ebert on January 9, 2009 8:19 PM 

 In Venice there is a small bridge leading over a side canal. Halfway up the steps is a landing, and a little cafe has found its perch there. In front of this cafe is a table with two chairs. If you chose the chair with its back to the cafe, you can overlook the steps leading from the canal path, or rivetta, ahead of you. This is a quiet neighborhood crossroads, a good place to sit with a cup of cappuccino and the Herald-Trib you got from the newsstand behind Piazza San Marco.

 Of course you must have a newspaper, a book, a sketchpad--anything that seems to absorb you. If you are simply sitting there, you will appear to be a Lonely Person and people will look away from you. If you seem preoccupied, you can observe them more closely. In any event, I do not sit there for the purpose of people-watching.

 No, I am engaged in Being By Myself in a City Where No One Knows Who I Am and No One I Know Knows Where to Find Me. I have such places in many cities. London, of course. Paris. Rome. Stockholm. Edinburgh. Cape Town. Cannes.

 I have another private place in Venice. At the end of my school year at the University of Cape Town, in January, I sailed on the Lloyd Tristino Europa up the east coast of Africa, and arrived in Venice for the first time a little after dawn, standing at the bow, the fog so thick San Giorgio Maggiore seemed to float in the clouds. That night I wandered into a little bar behind Piazza San Marco, and was greeted by the exuberant owner, a young man whose wife was minding their son in a corner.

 This was a local place. Lino, for that was his name, knew the name of everybody who came in. He hurried around the bar and, without asking, deposited a plate of oysters in front of me. They were alive and began to click. I had never eaten a raw oyster. It was the wise Jonathan Swift who told a friend: "It was a brave man who first ate an oyster." I opened the oysters and ate them. Then Lino brought a plate of French-fried onion rings. I dug in. They were curiously chewy. Lino walked to a seafood chart on the wall, and pointed cheerfully to a squid.

 I returned to Lino's of course every time I came to Venice. Once a man who ran a tourist gimcrack shop on the other side of the square personally cooked everyone gnocchi. No charge. Lino always recognized me, or made signs indicating he did. I went once with my friend John McHugh, a large Irishman. Every subsequent time, Lino used his hands to indicate a man of Falstaffian dimensions and we would agree on my friend's name: "Giovanni."

 One year I returned and there was no Lino. I asked inside: "Lino?" I was pointed around the corner to the Trattoria alla Rivetta, with canal steps passing its front window. Lino had moved up in the world to a restaurant with a back room. I walked in. Giovanni! Giovanni! He used sign language for Santa Claus. During the 1972 Venice Film Festival, I took everyone I knew there: Dusan Makavejev, Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson, Thomas Quinn Curtis. Sometimes I would sit alone in the back room and read a book through dinner. Lino and I had only one word in common, but we always remembered it.

 On our honeymoon, of course, Chaz and I visited Lino's. I waited for Lino to say "Giovanni!" He did. Chaz was surprised: "He actually does remember John!" More than 30 years had passed. In 2004, we took the family to Venice. I looked in at Lino's in the afternoon. There was no Lino. His son, now nearing 40, explained: "Lino, he a little retired. Here only in morning." The next morning I walked over to the Piazza and looked in through the window. All the lights were off except those in the kitchen. Lino, now bald and grey, was kneading pasta. I could have knocked on the glass and had his attention, but I didn't. We weren't that kind of friends.

 In Two Weeks in the Midday Sun, my book about the Cannes Film Festival, I wrote that I always wake up very early on the morning after I arrive, because of jet lag. I leave Chaz sleeping in our room at the Hotel Splendid, and walk down the rue Felix-Faure, passing the flower sellers setting out their bouquets, the fish-mongers unloading iced oysters, and the street-cleaners hosing down the pavement. I walk through the market, inhale the melons and the roses, and buy the International Herald-Tribune. I turn down the hill toward the old harbor, and at a particular cafe, at a particular table on the sidewalk, I order, in shameful French, a cafe au lait, a Perrier, and a croissant.

 This is such a sacred ritual that one year I looked up and saw Jeannette Hereniko, the founder of the Hawaii Film Festival, approaching me from the direction of the bus stop. She was in a bit of a crisis. It was 6 a.m., the airline had lost her carry-on bag, and she had no idea of the name of her hotel. She had been reading my book on the flight over, and decided to see if she could find me at that cafe. Of course she could. I didn't know where she was staying, either, but we had another cup of coffee.

 Of all the words I have written, a brief passage in that out-of-print book is the one most often mentioned to me. People tell me they know exactly what I'm describing. Here it is. It takes place on the other end of town from the old harbor:

 I walked out of the Martinez and was made uneasy again by the wind. So I turned inland, away from the Croisette and the beach, and walked up into one of the ordinary commercial streets of Cannes. I cut behind the Carlton, walked past the Hotel Savoy, and before long was at the little fruit and vegetable marketplace, at the other end of town from the big market. I took a table at a cafe, ordered an espresso and a Perrier, and began to sketch.

 Suddenly I was filled with an enormous happiness, such a feeling as comes only once or twice a year, and focused all my attention inward on the most momentous feeling of joy, on the sense that in this moment everything is in harmony. I sat very still. I was alone at a table in a square where no one I knew was likely to come, in a land where I did not speak the language, in a place where, for the moment, I could not be found. I was like a spirit returned from another world. All the people around me carried on their lives, sold their strawberries and called for their children, and my presence there made not the slightest difference to them. I was invisible. I would leave no track in this square, except for the few francs I would give to the cafe owner, who would throw them in a dish with hundreds of other coins.

 After a time, the intensity of my feelings passed, and I sat absolutely still at the table, a blank, taking in the movements before me. There are times when I think it would be possible to lead my whole life like this, a stranger in a foreign land, sitting in a cafe, drinking espresso, sketching on a pad, sometimes buying a newspaper which would tell me in my own language what was happening in other places to other people. I would see myself in the third person--that anonymous figure in the distance, crossing under the trees. Most of the time I am too busy to entertain such reflections. Indeed, I have filled my life so completely with commitments and deadlines that many days there is no time to think at all about the fact that I am living it. Bur these still moments, usually in foreign country or a strange city, give me the illusion that all of my life is as distant from me as the lives of the people in the marketplace, and that in some sense the person that is really me sits somewhere quietly at a table, watching it all go by.
 Yes, I've been back to the cafe several times again, always hoping for the same seat at the same table. Such returns are an important ritual to me. Chaz says it is impossible to get me to do anything the first time, and then impossible to stop me from doing it over and over again. After we were married, we went to Europe on our honeymoon. 

 "What did you visit?" her best friend Carolyn asked her.

 "We visited Roger's previous visits," she said.

 I confess it is true. "I always go to Sir John Soane's house," I would tell Chaz. And, "this is my favorite Wren church." And, "this is the oldest restaurant in London. I always order cockaleekie soup, toad in the hole, banger and mashed, and, to follow, Spotted Dick."

 Chaz studied the menu and told the waiter she would have the lamb chops. "Excellent choice, madam," he said, giving me a look that I think translated as, I remember you, all right.

 My new bride was also made to take a particular train from the Liverpool Street Station to Cambridge, and accompany me on a walk along the Cam to the village of Grantchester to visit the Rupert Brooke memorial and have lunch at the Green Man. And of course we had to walk slowly past the Old Vicarage, as I recited:

 Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
 And is there honey still for tea?
 And we had to ascertain that the Church clock indeed still stood at ten to three, the irrefutable evidence cited by generations of Cambridge students who protested it was not yet Closing Time.

 I may to the onlooker appear to suffer from some sort of compulsive repetition syndrome, but in fact I am engaged in a personal ritual. I have many sacred places, where I sit and think, "I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again." Sometimes, lost in reverie, I remember myself approaching across the same green, or down the same footpath, in 1962, or 1983, or many other times.

 In January 1966, I stopped in London on my way home from the University of Cape Town, and found that my friend and mentor, Daniel Curley, was living there with his family on a sabbatical leave. Dan was a lifelong London walker. As the professor teaching me on the first hour of the first day of my first year at Illinois, in English 101, he had struck me as a man admirable in every way. He was a novelist and short story writer, he read, he taught, he edited a famous little magazine, and it appeared he ordered his clothes from the Sears catalog. He invariably wore stout walking shoes, corduroy trousers, a tweed sports coat and, in winter, an Irish cable knit sweater. He carried a knapsack with binoculars and his Peterson's bird guide.

 Now, so dressed, he met me at the Belsize Park tube stop and took me on a walk past Keats's Cottage, up to the top of Parliament Hill, across the Heath to the Spaniard's Inn for lunch, then to Kenwood House, then on the 210 bus to Highgate Village, then through Highgate Cemetery and the graves of Karl Marx, George Eliot and Radclyffe Hall, and then down to the Archway tube stop, pausing to pet the bronze of Dick Whittington's Cat.

 I have taken this walk at least 50 times. Chaz has taken it five or six times, and says she wants to take it again: "No, really." No friend of mine in London, or visiting London, has failed to be taken along on this walk. There is even a book about it, The Perfect London Walk, written by Dan and myself, with photographs by my friend Jack Lane. The British edition was published by the Catto Press on Heath Street. We took the publisher's advance for the book and spent it to pay for our trips, and the trips of some pals who were needed, you see, as our advisors on the walk.

 I am often accompanied on my ritual visits, but just as often I go alone. Sometimes Chaz will say she's going shopping, or visiting a friend, or just staying in the room and reading in bed. "Why don't you go and touch your bases?" she'll ask me. I know she sympathizes. These secret visits are a way for me to measure the wheel of the years and my passage through life. It is not that I do not love my wife or my friends, and want to be with them. It is that sometimes on this amazing voyage through life we need to sit on the deck and regard the waves.

 I first visited the Moscow Arms near Pembridge Square in 1970, when the room fee at the hotel now named the Blue Bells was £4 a night. I have never met anybody in that pub. I always sit in the same corner booth. There is a man who comes in every lunchtime, tattooed, bald, and wearing a motorcycle jacket. He is nearly 40 years older now, but he is still there, and it looks like it's still the same jacket. Has he noticed me crossing his field of vision 50 or 75 times in his lifetime? Certainly not. But if he still comes at lunchtime every day, it is my duty to bear witness, because by now I have become the only person in the Moscow Arms who knows how long he has been doing this, or cares. I believe this includes him.

 I always visit a used book store, Keith Fawkes, in Flask Walk, Hampstead. I've found many precious books there. Then I go to the Holly Bush pub, up Heath Street to Holly Mount, where there are snug corners to ensconce myself. A corner is important. It provides privacy and an anchor and lets you exist independently of the room. It was while walking down from the Holly Bush that I first saw the Catto Gallery and made my best friends in London. There is a pub down the hill in the opposite direction I have been visiting so long that I even happen to know Helena Bonham Carter once lived upstairs, and that she has since moved. Did I ever ring her bell? Certainly not.

 In the years when I was drinking, I drank in these places. I haven't had a drink for 30 years, and I still visit them with the same enjoyment--actually more. The thing about a British pub is that you don't have to drink booze. If you don't, nobody looks at you funny. They provide tea, coffee, lunch, atmosphere, a place to sit, a time to think. At the Holly Bush I always have the Ploughman's lunch with an extra pickle

 But let me stop place-dropping. These places do not involve only a visit, but a meditation: I have been here before, I am here now, I will be here again. Robert Altman told me he kept track of time not by the years, but by the films he was working on. "I'm always preparing the next film," he said. That is living in a time outside time. Of course everyone's time must run out. But not yet. Not until I'm finished touching a few more bases. I will sit in the corner by the fire in the Holly Bush again, and stand in the wind on top Parliament Hill, and I know exactly how to find that cafe in Venice, although I could never describe the way. Oh, yes I do.
	ll by ourselves alone

	By Roger Ebert on January 9, 2009 8:19 PM

	In Venice there is a small bridge leading over a side canal. Halfway up the steps is a landing, and a little cafe has found its perch there. In front of this cafe is a table with two chairs. If you chose the chair with its back to the cafe, you can overlook the steps leading from the canal path, or rivetta, ahead of you. This is a quiet neighborhood crossroads, a good place to sit with a cup of cappuccino and the Herald-Trib you got from the newsstand behind Piazza San Marco.

	Of course you must have a newspaper, a book, a sketchpad--anything that seems to absorb you. If you are simply sitting there, you will appear to be a Lonely Person and people will look away from you. If you seem preoccupied, you can observe them more closely. In any event, I do not sit there for the purpose of people-watching.

	No, I am engaged in Being By Myself in a City Where No One Knows Who I Am and No One I Know Knows Where to Find Me. I have such places in many cities. London, of course. Paris. Rome. Stockholm. Edinburgh. Cape Town. Cannes.

	I have another private place in Venice. At the end of my school year at the University of Cape Town, in January, I sailed on the Lloyd Tristino Europa up the east coast of Africa, and arrived in Venice for the first time a little after dawn, standing at the bow, the fog so thick San Giorgio Maggiore seemed to float in the clouds. That night I wandered into a little bar behind Piazza San Marco, and was greeted by the exuberant owner, a young man whose wife was minding their son in a corner.

	This was a local place. Lino, for that was his name, knew the name of everybody who came in. He hurried around the bar and, without asking, deposited a plate of oysters in front of me. They were alive and began to click. I had never eaten a raw oyster. It was the wise Jonathan Swift who told a friend: "It was a brave man who first ate an oyster." I opened the oysters and ate them. Then Lino brought a plate of French-fried onion rings. I dug in. They were curiously chewy. Lino walked to a seafood chart on the wall, and pointed cheerfully to a squid.

	I returned to Lino's of course every time I came to Venice. Once a man who ran a tourist gimcrack shop on the other side of the square personally cooked everyone gnocchi. No charge. Lino always recognized me, or made signs indicating he did. I went once with my friend John McHugh, a large Irishman. Every subsequent time, Lino used his hands to indicate a man of Falstaffian dimensions and we would agree on my friend's name: "Giovanni."

	One year I returned and there was no Lino. I asked inside: "Lino?" I was pointed around the corner to the Trattoria alla Rivetta, with canal steps passing its front window. Lino had moved up in the world to a restaurant with a back room. I walked in. Giovanni! Giovanni! He used sign language for Santa Claus. During the 1972 Venice Film Festival, I took everyone I knew there: Dusan Makavejev, Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson, Thomas Quinn Curtis. Sometimes I would sit alone in the back room and read a book through dinner. Lino and I had only one word in common, but we always remembered it.

	On our honeymoon, of course, Chaz and I visited Lino's. I waited for Lino to say "Giovanni!" He did. Chaz was surprised: "He actually does remember John!" More than 30 years had passed. In 2004, we took the family to Venice. I looked in at Lino's in the afternoon. There was no Lino. His son, now nearing 40, explained: "Lino, he a little retired. Here only in morning." The next morning I walked over to the Piazza and looked in through the window. All the lights were off except those in the kitchen. Lino, now bald and grey, was kneading pasta. I could have knocked on the glass and had his attention, but I didn't. We weren't that kind of friends.

	In Two Weeks in the Midday Sun, my book about the Cannes Film Festival, I wrote that I always wake up very early on the morning after I arrive, because of jet lag. I leave Chaz sleeping in our room at the Hotel Splendid, and walk down the rue Felix-Faure, passing the flower sellers setting out their bouquets, the fish-mongers unloading iced oysters, and the street-cleaners hosing down the pavement. I walk through the market, inhale the melons and the roses, and buy the International Herald-Tribune. I turn down the hill toward the old harbor, and at a particular cafe, at a particular table on the sidewalk, I order, in shameful French, a cafe au lait, a Perrier, and a croissant.

	This is such a sacred ritual that one year I looked up and saw Jeannette Hereniko, the founder of the Hawaii Film Festival, approaching me from the direction of the bus stop. She was in a bit of a crisis. It was 6 a.m., the airline had lost her carry-on bag, and she had no idea of the name of her hotel. She had been reading my book on the flight over, and decided to see if she could find me at that cafe. Of course she could. I didn't know where she was staying, either, but we had another cup of coffee.

	Of all the words I have written, a brief passage in that out-of-print book is the one most often mentioned to me. People tell me they know exactly what I'm describing. Here it is. It takes place on the other end of town from the old harbor:

	I walked out of the Martinez and was made uneasy again by the wind. So I turned inland, away from the Croisette and the beach, and walked up into one of the ordinary commercial streets of Cannes. I cut behind the Carlton, walked past the Hotel Savoy, and before long was at the little fruit and vegetable marketplace, at the other end of town from the big market. I took a table at a cafe, ordered an espresso and a Perrier, and began to sketch.

	Suddenly I was filled with an enormous happiness, such a feeling as comes only once or twice a year, and focused all my attention inward on the most momentous feeling of joy, on the sense that in this moment everything is in harmony. I sat very still. I was alone at a table in a square where no one I knew was likely to come, in a land where I did not speak the language, in a place where, for the moment, I could not be found. I was like a spirit returned from another world. All the people around me carried on their lives, sold their strawberries and called for their children, and my presence there made not the slightest difference to them. I was invisible. I would leave no track in this square, except for the few francs I would give to the cafe owner, who would throw them in a dish with hundreds of other coins.

	After a time, the intensity of my feelings passed, and I sat absolutely still at the table, a blank, taking in the movements before me. There are times when I think it would be possible to lead my whole life like this, a stranger in a foreign land, sitting in a cafe, drinking espresso, sketching on a pad, sometimes buying a newspaper which would tell me in my own language what was happening in other places to other people. I would see myself in the third person--that anonymous figure in the distance, crossing under the trees. Most of the time I am too busy to entertain such reflections. Indeed, I have filled my life so completely with commitments and deadlines that many days there is no time to think at all about the fact that I am living it. Bur these still moments, usually in foreign country or a strange city, give me the illusion that all of my life is as distant from me as the lives of the people in the marketplace, and that in some sense the person that is really me sits somewhere quietly at a table, watching it all go by.
	Yes, I've been back to the cafe several times again, always hoping for the same seat at the same table. Such returns are an important ritual to me. Chaz says it is impossible to get me to do anything the first time, and then impossible to stop me from doing it over and over again. After we were married, we went to Europe on our honeymoon.

	"What did you visit?" her best friend Carolyn asked her.

	"We visited Roger's previous visits," she said.

	I confess it is true. "I always go to Sir John Soane's house," I would tell Chaz. And, "this is my favorite Wren church." And, "this is the oldest restaurant in London. I always order cockaleekie soup, toad in the hole, banger and mashed, and, to follow, Spotted Dick."

	Chaz studied the menu and told the waiter she would have the lamb chops. "Excellent choice, madam," he said, giving me a look that I think translated as, I remember you, all right.

	My new bride was also made to take a particular train from the Liverpool Street Station to Cambridge, and accompany me on a walk along the Cam to the village of Grantchester to visit the Rupert Brooke memorial and have lunch at the Green Man. And of course we had to walk slowly past the Old Vicarage, as I recited:

	Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
	And is there honey still for tea?
	And we had to ascertain that the Church clock indeed still stood at ten to three, the irrefutable evidence cited by generations of Cambridge students who protested it was not yet Closing Time.

	I may to the onlooker appear to suffer from some sort of compulsive repetition syndrome, but in fact I am engaged in a personal ritual. I have many sacred places, where I sit and think, "I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again." Sometimes, lost in reverie, I remember myself approaching across the same green, or down the same footpath, in 1962, or 1983, or many other times.

	In January 1966, I stopped in London on my way home from the University of Cape Town, and found that my friend and mentor, Daniel Curley, was living there with his family on a sabbatical leave. Dan was a lifelong London walker. As the professor teaching me on the first hour of the first day of my first year at Illinois, in English 101, he had struck me as a man admirable in every way. He was a novelist and short story writer, he read, he taught, he edited a famous little magazine, and it appeared he ordered his clothes from the Sears catalog. He invariably wore stout walking shoes, corduroy trousers, a tweed sports coat and, in winter, an Irish cable knit sweater. He carried a knapsack with binoculars and his Peterson's bird guide.

	Now, so dressed, he met me at the Belsize Park tube stop and took me on a walk past Keats's Cottage, up to the top of Parliament Hill, across the Heath to the Spaniard's Inn for lunch, then to Kenwood House, then on the 210 bus to Highgate Village, then through Highgate Cemetery and the graves of Karl Marx, George Eliot and Radclyffe Hall, and then down to the Archway tube stop, pausing to pet the bronze of Dick Whittington's Cat.

	I have taken this walk at least 50 times. Chaz has taken it five or six times, and says she wants to take it again: "No, really." No friend of mine in London, or visiting London, has failed to be taken along on this walk. There is even a book about it, The Perfect London Walk, written by Dan and myself, with photographs by my friend Jack Lane. The British edition was published by the Catto Press on Heath Street. We took the publisher's advance for the book and spent it to pay for our trips, and the trips of some pals who were needed, you see, as our advisors on the walk.

	I am often accompanied on my ritual visits, but just as often I go alone. Sometimes Chaz will say she's going shopping, or visiting a friend, or just staying in the room and reading in bed. "Why don't you go and touch your bases?" she'll ask me. I know she sympathizes. These secret visits are a way for me to measure the wheel of the years and my passage through life. It is not that I do not love my wife or my friends, and want to be with them. It is that sometimes on this amazing voyage through life we need to sit on the deck and regard the waves.

	I first visited the Moscow Arms near Pembridge Square in 1970, when the room fee at the hotel now named the Blue Bells was £4 a night. I have never met anybody in that pub. I always sit in the same corner booth. There is a man who comes in every lunchtime, tattooed, bald, and wearing a motorcycle jacket. He is nearly 40 years older now, but he is still there, and it looks like it's still the same jacket. Has he noticed me crossing his field of vision 50 or 75 times in his lifetime? Certainly not. But if he still comes at lunchtime every day, it is my duty to bear witness, because by now I have become the only person in the Moscow Arms who knows how long he has been doing this, or cares. I believe this includes him.

	I always visit a used book store, Keith Fawkes, in Flask Walk, Hampstead. I've found many precious books there. Then I go to the Holly Bush pub, up Heath Street to Holly Mount, where there are snug corners to ensconce myself. A corner is important. It provides privacy and an anchor and lets you exist independently of the room. It was while walking down from the Holly Bush that I first saw the Catto Gallery and made my best friends in London. There is a pub down the hill in the opposite direction I have been visiting so long that I even happen to know Helena Bonham Carter once lived upstairs, and that she has since moved. Did I ever ring her bell? Certainly not.

	In the years when I was drinking, I drank in these places. I haven't had a drink for 30 years, and I still visit them with the same enjoyment--actually more. The thing about a British pub is that you don't have to drink booze. If you don't, nobody looks at you funny. They provide tea, coffee, lunch, atmosphere, a place to sit, a time to think. At the Holly Bush I always have the Ploughman's lunch with an extra pickle

	But let me stop place-dropping. These places do not involve only a visit, but a meditation: I have been here before, I am here now, I will be here again. Robert Altman told me he kept track of time not by the years, but by the films he was working on. "I'm always preparing the next film," he said. That is living in a time outside time. Of course everyone's time must run out. But not yet. Not until I'm finished touching a few more bases. I will sit in the corner by the fire in the Holly Bush again, and stand in the wind on top Parliament Hill, and I know exactly how to find that cafe in Venice, although I could never describe the way. Oh, yes I do.
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