We just had dinner, and I was in a conversation about paradises.
I've always wanted to know what people's paradises are.
If they could happen, what would they choose?
So I decided I'd like to read you a poem.
It's about that.
And if there are any freshmen here,
I want to tell you that Perugino was a famous Italian
Renaissance painter.
He was the teacher of Raffaello.
Oh, my client's here.
And he invented the landscape that became very famous.
It's a landscape of Umbria, the country around Perugia,
which is where I first fell in love.
So it's all mixed up together for me.
And in the background of his paintings,
you will see this lovely, sweet, dreamlike Italian vision
of the good world.
And you see it-- like with the Mona Lisa-- you see it
over, say, the Madonna's shoulder,
past the Magi's outstretched hand.
It keeps turning up.
And the poem goes like this.
In Perugino we have sometimes seen our country.
Incidental, beyond the Madonna, the mild hills and the valleys
that we have always almost remembered,
the light that explains our secret conviction of exile.
That light, those hills, that valley,
that country where people finally
touch as we would touch, reaching with hand and body
and mouth, weeping, and do not meet.
The small perfect trees of loneliness,
dark with our longing against the light.