And I'll just read a couple more if--
I always get the feeling-- at some point--
that you were standing between--
that I'm standing between you and the rest of your lives.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, my wife and I had planned to go to Europe for a vacation
one summer, and we had to scrub the plans because
of a sickness.
I was sick, I was a crybaby.
And so, we spent the summer at home.
And I wrote a poem trying to console myself
and which attempts to praise that the pleasures of--
the more domestic pleasures.
And it's "Consolation."
"How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer--
[LAUGHTER]
--wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every road sign
and billboard and all the sudden hand
gestures of my compatriots.
[LAUGHTER]
There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes,
or famous domes, and there is no need
to memorize a succession of kings,
or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus,
see Napoleon's little bed on Elba,
or view the bones of a saint under glass.
How much better to command the simple precinct of home than
be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrasebooks and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyed camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?
Instead of slouching in a cafe, ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop
and to the waitress known as Dot.
I will slide into the flow of the morning paper,
all language barriers down, rivers of idiom running freely,
eggs over easy on the way.
And after breakfast, I will not have
to find someone willing to photograph me
with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat, and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car,
as if it were the great car of English itself, and sounding
my loud, vernacular horn, speed off down
a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna."
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]