Gone forever is the experience of licking an ice cream cone in the Forum, and the feelings of kinship with the ancients that went with it.

I started work on June 9th, four days after Commencement. The shock to the system was only compounded by the jet-lag that hung over the first week at work like the uncontrolled body odour on an Italian train. Every so often, I still find myself sitting at my computer for ten minutes at a time, checking my e-mail compulsively and wondering where on earth I am and what on earth I’m supposed to be doing. (Just like at Harvard!)

I’ve fought hard not to think of my job as a summer internship, even though that’s what it is on paper. I was hired as an intern at the World Food Programme, as most people are, and my contract explicitly states that I shouldn’t hope for any kind of advancement without going off and either getting a graduate degree or two or building up my resumé. But I’m not allowing myself to work 9-to-5, trying to do as little as possible. I’m not going back to school for a year (at least) and I want to sink my teeth into the real world while I’m stuck in it.

It’s been weird, though, if not difficult. It’s the weekend here in Rome, and I’ve been looking forward to leaving my apartment as little as possible. Somewhere in the course of being surrounded by crazy people (read: overachievers) my whole life, I’ve developed the impression that sleep is good, and work is the only reasonable excuse not to be sleeping. (The converse is also true.)

But I am in Rome for the summer, and I won’t be here forever. I’m knowingly wasting the incredible opportunity I have here to experience Roman nightlife (albeit by myself, for the most part) and just to be out in the city at the most beautiful time of year. But, maybe because the “real world” that I’m living in is Italian (at the moment), I’m possessed by a summer laziness that makes it unlikely I’ll leave my air conditioned flat to sit in a bar and feel cosmopolitan.

(A massive disclaimer, here: I’ve had friends visiting me during the week, which means I go out with them, have a great time, and go without sleep for a few days. So not going out on the weekend is pretty understandable, in my case. I think. Is it?)

My attitude towards getting out in the city has made me realize three things:

1. I’ve been programmed by the social experience of university to think that not going out every Thursday, Friday and Saturday (at least) means that there’s something wrong with me, when I’m pretture sure it doesn’t.

2. Being out of school has untethered me to whatever moorings were keeping me from reverting to my dorky, workaholic high school self. When I was in high school, I worked hard, slept a lot, and didn’t really care if I didn’t go out on the weekends. When I was in college, this was not the case. Now, it is again. Hmm.

3. The fact that I’m living in one of the most exciting, cosmopolitan urban centres on the planet and not taking advantage of it (and feeling OK about that), means that I might not be built for the big city, after all. I miss Vancouver, and the west coast mentality that having fun means being outdoors and being active, but not necessarily doing exciting things every night. I miss evergreen trees and light rain and beaches downtown a lot more than I do being able to take the train to New York for the night or to go out five nights a week in Boston and Cambridge. Could it be that I’m sufficiently Canadian not to want to be in a constant state of sensory overload? Is it even a Canadian condition that I’m diagnosing myself with, or is it rather some artifact of growing up on the west coast?

So, for the moment, I’m home alone. Well, not exactly. I’ve got an internet connection, a couple hundred pages of reports on aid dependency to review, and a bunch of grad school and fellowship applications to do for the second year in a row. I’m sure I won’t be lacking for amusement. I’ve also got cheap beer in the fridge, and a little balcony overlooking my apartment’s courtyard, on which to drink it. Oh, and I’ve got another season of The West Wing to watch on DVD. Life is good. Excitement is overrated.

For this weekend, anyway.

A few good friends from university have been in Rome in the past few weeks, and I’ve been using them as a wonderful excuse to try the restaurants and bars that colleagues have recommended to me. Between mouthfuls of mozzarella and spaghetti, I’ve developed a nasty habit of forcing my friends to teach me things that I realize I probably ought to know, but that I never actually learned.

My favourite topics of late have been financial. I’ve finally come to the realization that while working for “the man” might not be terribly original, it’s also not all that offensive an idea, either. So I’ve started asking questions. I now know (thanks to Alex) that an investment bank is not actually a bank, and I now understand (thanks to Zander) how currency exchanges, futures markets, and trade balances operate. These are things that I sort of understood, but not really.

Is it hard to believe that I graduated from a prestigious American university that sends three-fifths of its graduates to Wall Street without a shred of financial literacy to my name? Not in the least.

After being dormant for almost a year, I’m bringing this ol’ blog back to life. Last summer, I was in Paris doing thesis research and interning at a social work facility for newly-arrived refugee families. Now that I’ve graduated, I’ve moved on to the real world. Sort of.

On June 9th—four days after I graduated—I started work at the United Nations World Food Programme, in Rome. In the past five weeks, I’ve had a whirlwind introduction to the world of food assistance and the realities of international humanitarian organizations. At this point, I’m sufficiently thrilled and fulfilled to start committing the realities of the last month-and-a-half to paper.

If you want my opinions on things that happen in the world, you should check out Gadfly. If you want to read about me, stick around—things are going to get unhealthy around here.

To read more of my opinions, visit Gadfly.

This will be my last dispatch from the City of Lights.

To mark the end of our respective stays in Paris, my brother and I went out for a nice dinner tonight at a brasserie near my apartment, then made the trek to the western side of the city for the obligatory trip up the Eiffel Tower. We’d arrived too late to get to its summit and had to content ourselves with the overpopulated second level. After squeezing our way past the crowds clogging the vantage points high above Paris’ twinkling, fog-obscured lights, we reached the always-deserted western side of the balcony, facing out toward Neuilly-sur-Seine and the great void of the Bois de Boulogne. It’s a part of Paris that I, like most visitors, never visited during my stay here. It’s a part of Paris that defies the theme park grandeur and grace of the rest of the city. It’s a part of Paris that feels uncomfortably like the rest-of-the-world for anyone who arrives here imbued with a romantic idea of what Paris is. And for someone who’s spent a summer studying the venerated ideal of French identity, it struck a real chord. Everyone in this country—transient tourists, new immigrants, and français de souche alike—is imbued with a certain idea of France; Paris is a city of surreal and staggering grace, France is a universalist, laïque republic where the dreams of the Girondists are being realized anew each day. Forget the American Dream, its corners stained with the cynicism of experience; in France, the ideal is all we choose to see. The rest—no less real—is left ignored, and the whole chorus of policy-makers and pundits and philosophers and passers-by all huddle together in mutual reassurance on the lighter, prettier side of the viewing platform.

In this country, perhaps, ignorance really is bliss. But what a view!

Some things, of course, were exactly the same. Tourists pushing and shoving their way through the galleries, chatting away in all sorts of languages loudly enough to be overheard by the entire room. Tourists dragging their restless children past pieces of art that they think their children ought to see, even though they might not have a damned clue what they—and their children—are looking at. Tourists giving the evil eye to other tourists with the gall to pose for a picture right in front of the Venus de Milo, when they’ve come halfway across the world to do exactly the same thing. And hyper-judgmental tourists watching snidely as other tourists push and shove, drag their restless children, and obstruct the Venus de Milo, all the while fancying themselves above the fray. Because, let’s face it, I am a more thoughtful museum patron than that babbling Korean tour group.

Visiting any museum is exhausting. When in Rome last month, I spent a morning at the Villa Borghese, sweating and looking at statues by Bernini and Canova. In one of the museum’s many small rooms, I was making an observation about a particular piece to the friend I was sightseeing with. A tour guide walked in, leading perhaps a half-dozen people. She hushed us rather brusquely, before launching into a loud, long-winded description of something or other. Just thinking about it makes my blood boil. But it’s just not possible to make it through a crowded museum without having one’s patience tested. Add the Louvre’s sheer bulk and you get seven hours of sore legs, mini-tantrums, and dehydration. In my case, I can usually last about five minutes before someone asks me to please move, you’re obstructing the paining. You’re so tall! Do you play basketball?

That’s when I turn around and see some beleaguered-looking American wearing a fanny-pack and khaki shorts, black athletic socks creeping out of offensively white running shoes and clashing repulsively with a brightly-coloured souvenir baseball cap. I get a face-full of their impatience, lose my cool, and heave them into the canvas.

The Louvre would be totally insufferable were it not for the stuff hanging on the walls. Even seen through a crowd of gawking people, an epic canvas by David or Delacroix or Géricault or Veronese can take your breath away. The comparatively deserted galleries full of lesser French masterpieces on the third floor of the Sully wing blow just about every other museum on earth out of the water, all by themselves. That said, I still found the shuffling mass of people squinting to glimpse the Mona Lisa more fascinating than the painting itself.

When it comes to appreciating art, the Louvre is Mecca. And it’s about to get just a little more Muslim.

In 2009, the Louvre’s Department of Islamic Art will move from the basement of the Richelieu wing to a new home in the Cour Visconti, in the shadow of the Denon wing’s Grande Gallerie, home of the museum’s most important masterpieces. It’s a big step up from the status quo; today, the department is accessible by a staircase somewhere deep in the middle of the ancient Mesopotamia exhibit, and only the bravest visitors make it down into the building’s bowels, where dark, desolate galleries await, stuffed full of under-appreciated antiquities.

In a few years, however, the museum’s Muslim treasures will be housed under a shimmering, ultra-modern glass and metal canopy in the heart of the Louvre’s most-visited section. The new wing either looks like rising floodwaters or a sand dune covered with sequins. You decide.

The whole enterprise is being bankrolled by a 17 million Euro gift from the concisely-named Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who owns a lot of things and gives away lots of money. He’s the guy that tried to give $10 million to the city of New York after September 11th, only to have his cheque returned, uncashed, by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who’d been ticked off by the rogue royal’s sentiments about America’s supporting role in the Israeli-Palestinian mosh-pit. He’s also the same Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (go figure) who signed over $20 million to Harvard in 2005, as seed money for a new Islamic Studies caliphate at the university. At the time, Harvard Students for Israel President Amy C. Zelcer ’07 told The Crimson: “It seems like this money has Jewish blood on it.”

There’s obviously a very clear pattern to the prince’s giving. He likes Islam. He thinks the West ought to know more about Islam. And he has way too much money. His gift has more than passing significance, however. The Louvre is arguably the most important museum on Earth. It’s certainly the most important in France. And France, as we know, had a rather complicated relationship with Islam. Moving a long-neglected department quite literally into the sunlight is a giant step for the museum. One would think that it would have broader social implications; the elevation of Islamic art to the same level as its future neighbours—Da Vinci, Caravaggio, Géricault, and Ingres, among others—in a country that has struggled very publicly with making the cultural attributes of modern Islam fit into the laïque Republic sounds like a pretty big deal to me.

But rather than seize on the fancy new building project as a chance to celebrate the distinct cultural heritage of France’s Muslims, the high-walled Cour Visconti will mostly likely hem in the new wing’s social implications, along with its unusual design. The new wing will be hailed by many as an important step in recognizing the artistic heritage in Islam, but the praise will be phrased in such general terms that any hope for making a real point in this country will be thoroughly eroded by a tidal wave of cosmopolitanism. And as for the art itself, just as the placards in the current Islamic art section frame the objets d’art in strictly cultural (as opposed to religious) terms, few will even see a link between the Louvre’s collections and those pesky Muslim middle-schoolers and their headscarves.

The opportunity won’t be squandered by xenophobia or racism, but by elitism. It’s art, after all. From another culture. It’s fascinating and all that, but it’s not exactly going to make waves in the campagne. Just as Paris’ Institut du Monde Arabe is one of the western world’s foremost Islamic Studies centres but goes almost completely unnoticed by the average Parisian, the Louvre’s new wing will earn more praise (and scorn) for its curves than its content. I don’t expect any policy-makers will end up with twisted knickers just because the design appears to, well, veil the Louvre’s Islamic collections.

Perhaps not surprisingly, President Jacques Chirac put it most plainly back in 2005. In announcing the prince’s donation, the president declared that the project intended to “confirm the universal purview of this prestigious institution” and “remind the French and the world of the essential link between Islamic civilizations and our own culture.”

“Between Islamic civilizations and our own culture.” Them and us. Exactly.

Over at the enchantingly-titled “CES Blog”, Noah Rosenblum has some terrific reflections on this magnificent, if dreary, city:

Paris is still Paris, with its own rhythm and life. Although the older generations shop the old fashioned French way – a butcher, a baker, a candle-stick maker – I’m part of an increasingly large number of young Parisians who shop for the week at the local Monoprix. Even there, the French spirit of bureaucratic specialization dominates. Woe to he who expects the cashier to bag his groceries. The cashier’s job ends with the tapis roulant. At least most places will let you bag your food yourself if the bagger is otherwise engaged.

A few days ago, anxious at holding up the line, I bagged my goods in a frenzy. The woman behind me in line – a forty year old with red hair in a business suit – looked to me, perplexed, and told me slow down. “Take your time” she said in clipped French. “It’s the only thing that’s free”.

The trip was phenomenal, however, because I was clever enough to visit and stay with a friend who is a Classicist. Latin scholars flock to Rome each summer to study with a raucous, brash American monk called Reginald Foster, whose day job is being the papacy’s chief “Latinist”. (This is a term that I’d never heard before my trip to Rome, but which I heard nonstop while there.)

That means that Reggie, as his followers call him, is the guy who translates official documents into the sacred language of Catholicism, since unlike most major religions, Catholic clergy are exceptional for not speaking the language of their own liturgy. Reggie, I’m told, is fond of ranting about what a disgrace this is. Having grown up Jewish, where I learned to read Hebrew as a child and where religious services are often held in nothing but the sacred, ancient language, it’s bizarre that the Vatican has reached out to its adherents so fiercely that it’s abandoned, except in an official sense, the language on which its church was (mostly) built. Even though I know the basic explanation for the difference—Christianity seeks converts and always has, and it’s hard to persuade a barbarian/savage to convert when you’re addressing him in Latin—it seems a weird exception to the otherwise firm liturgical orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. (To speak Latin is to be excessively exclusive, but to exclude women from the clergy and homosexuals from the Church is fine and dandy? Really?)

Reggie Foster, then, is the precise opposite of the rest of his Church. He’s positively liberal, it seems, on many of the moral questions on which the Vatican is unyielding, but when it comes to language, watch out; there ain’t no lingua like a lingra sacra.

Despite Reggie’s forward thinking, he’s not the one guilty of sacrilege. That would be his students, who worship him like nothing I have ever seen. Hanging off his every word, the members of his summer class—a mix of clergy, Latin teachers, and Ivy League undergraduates, from what I could tell—are spellbound as Reggie leads them in recitations of great Latin verse.

First read, then chanted, and finally sung, I couldn’t help but be drawn in as the raspy-voiced monk shouted bits of translation as the class chanted its way through Horace’s poetry, as we sat among the ruins of his villa in the hills outside Rome. We’d woken up at dawn, it seemed at the time, and met the class at the Termini train station. Reggie had started on his first beer, living up to his reputation for drinking constantly during the day. (Always beer and wine, I was told, never water.) We rode the subway, crammed far too many people onto a coach, then did the same on a second bus, before arriving at a charming little village in the hills. We took a break for coffee and rest before hiking across a valley, through the countryside, to the hilltop site where Horace spend his free time, writing poetry and living off the generosity of Augustus’ chief art patron, Maecenas. And so there I was, reading the poems that Horace composed about his life in the country, and sitting on the foundation stones of his villa. It was surreal, made all the more so by a surplus of cheap red wine and the constant rasp of my new teacher’s voice. After a hearty, simple lunch by a natural spring, we completed the sweaty journey in reverse. And just like that, Reggie Foster was gone.

I spent the rest of the weekend doing bits of sightseeing, spending time with the Latin class, and drinking ice-cold water out of public fountains. I was awed by St. Peter’s and humbled by the Pantheon, and I stuffed myself with fresh pizza. Try as I might, however, I just couldn’t top the charm of being drunk on cheap wine on a Roman hillside, a gregariously tipsy monk from Millwakee shouting Horace at me as his acolytes drank up his every word. Forget another world—in a weekend in Rome, I visited another millennium.