HUM 325: JOURNAL 1; WEEK 1

Rome is by far the city of history, passion, art, and life, and in order to properly view all that Rome has to offer one cannot be the normal “paralyzed” person. Instead, a person has to view the monument or ruin and analyze that piece. This method will provide that said person to fully understand the beauty and the purpose of the object that is located in Rome. This process can be completed by either analyzing the piece, reflecting on the piece, or just considering the piece in any other form a person chooses in order to understand the art behind the object. After listening to Rabbi Spitzer in class and learning this process, I was able to think about what this new way of looking at the ruins and how it would affect my understanding of everything. After arriving in the city, I was able to realize just how important this was and to properly begin to understand just what Rome had to offer!

On our first trip into the city, we had the chance to view one of the most well known ruins: The Coliseum! This piece was beyond beautiful and was just astonishing. To just think about how Romans could build such a enormous piece with so much detail was beyond me. Before discussing about the new process that we learned in class earlier that day, I would have just stood there with the paralyzed expression of “Wow!” but now I know that that is the wrong way to look at things. The early morning class taught me to analyze the coliseum and reflect on what I was seeing, and because of this I was able to understand it better. When I saw the coliseum I tried to view what the coliseum looked like before, which was really easy after Laura (the tour guide) showed us her very helpful flip book which contained the picture of the coliseum now and how it looked like in ancient Rome. The coliseum, though, has been through so much destruction throughout the years, and it just astonishes me to think that people could do this to their own history.

Every day we hear people telling us that we have to preserve the past and present for our future generations. That we must take care of what we have so that everyone else can have these possessions as well, but it is evident that the latter Romans did not have that same understanding. Almost every crevice of the Coliseum is striped and now missing the marble that once covered the beautiful stadium. There are holes in every wall left by people digging away at the structure in order to obtain the marble. In order to understand why people have done this to their prized artifact, I must consider what Rabbi Spitzer said: They recycled their history and just transformed those pieces into new ideas new structures for future generations. As we continue to think about the Coliseum I tried to understand this way of thinking and applied it to other visits. Recycling came extremely evident when we toured the Roman forum because of the many changes that it has had to the city.

The Roman forum, which was the center of the Roman republic, was once covered by dirt, but now stands for everyone to view and to enjoy, and there is still a lot of the city that is uncovered just waiting to be viewed by future generations. This city did not go through as much destruction as the coliseum did, but it did have a lot changes that was done by generations following the fall of the Roman Empire. There is now a door in the chapel that was once not there and marks from rope that was used to try to pull the columns down in order to preserve them. Also, on top of the Temple which was once a house of a pagan emperor, now held a Christian cross. It was just a neat experience to be able to view the center of the well known Julius Caesar and to be able to compare and contrast original ideas about the place that we have learned through stories and books about ancient Rome. As I was touring the Forum I tried to imagine the different armies marching through the sacred walkway down the center celebrating their recent victory with the people and the senate. I tried to imagine the Senate standing up in the speaking corner and greeting the people and informing them of recent changes or news of the Republic. As I walked through the forum I could not help but to think about the reason of changing artifacts and taking them apart. Is it because each generation needs to write a little bit of their history? Does “recycling” give us access to change and make our mark on the land as the people before us and to allow the future generations to imagine and think about how we lived?

When I consider this idea of recycling, I begin to think of our own artifacts back in America. Is this what is going to happen to the Statue of Liberty or to the monuments in Washington, D.C. Are we just going to strip away their beauty on the outside and just let the history present their inner beauty? As I start thinking about this idea, I consider the idea that maybe America will someday have what Rome has. We will have Ruins that once were great and useful, but has gone through many generations, seeing many historical events, and then being recycled into new generations and their ways of life and culture. This process may destroy past ruins, but it also may bring about new opportunities and new stories that can be told to the future students that will one day read about our reign in time. If this idea is true than should we all start changing the present? Should we start re-building and leaving our story for others? My answer is yes. We need to present the future generations of this world with our story and our purpose for life. Show them our mistakes, our success, and help guide them on how to live their own lives just like how the Romans have shown us.