Naples

Four hours of sleep, for better or worse.

Still not fully inhabiting San Francisco, as much or more in Naples.

Francesco's driving his cab around the city where he was born. We talk about Berlusconi. He despises Berlusconi. "Too many women," he says. "I have one woman, my wife." He shows me a picture, she's beautiful, 28, a year younger than Francesco. There's a baby, and another on the way.

He drives to the top of the hill. Vesuvius is in the distance. I've already been to Vesuvius, walked Pompeii and Herculeneum with the other tourists.

Naples: I've never been in a place as proud of itself. The cabdriver, the waiter, the barber. There's a park in the Mergellina district where Virgil and Leopardi are buried--Leopardi for sure, Virgil perhaps. I take the subway there and walk around, thinking that I travel just to be in touch with a time when poets were important to others besides other poets and themselves.

Four hours in the Museo Archeological Nazionale. The Farnese collection of antiquities. A bust of Zeno of Elea but not of Pyrrho of Elis. I think of Duchamp, believe it's Zeno and the paradoxes that had such an influence. It's not until I'm back in San Francisco that I see that I was right and I was wrong. Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360-275 BC) was at least as important. The only two surviving statements attributed to him were found among Duchamp's effects:

"Nothing really exists but human life is governed by convention."

"Nothing is in itself more this than that."