But the path that lies behind is indistinct, too: its myriad and confusing turns already half forgotten, the significance of the landmarks encountered along the way misunderstood, misinterpreted. The path that lies ahead of me is a riddle. On the path of my life, in the middle of my life, I know little about where I have been, and where I might go. Who is this “I”? The dead man, who once enjoyed all the pleasures of Arcadia? Or death itself, which haunts even the most beautiful landscapes? It felt, at least, that I had found an end to the walk.

On it was carved a likeness of his own painting, which hangs in the Louvre, of shepherds in some pastoral idyll stumbling on a sarcophagus on which is inscribed “Et in Arcadia ego”, meaning “I, too, was in Arcadia”. Stepping inside, I came across the pale, restrained tomb of the painter Nicolas Poussin.

Having no destination in mind – no church, no gallery, no park or vista or bar, as we usually had on our wintry, twilit walks that month – I felt flat and dismal.Įventually I turned a corner and came into a square in which stood a church, San Lorenzo in Lucina. There were no revelations, only weariness. But all I did was wind round and around, covering no real ground, re-emerging frustratingly again and again on the straight and dreary spine of the Corso. I would simply walk, I thought, taking random turnings when it felt right to do so. I was living, for the month of February 2016, in a building in the Borghese gardens, and one evening, leaving behind my partner and his son, who were engaged in some task in which I played no role, I set forth with the express purpose of aimlessness.

One night in Rome, I set myself the task of trying to do it. Conversely, I cannot even lose myself effectively.

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