Eat, Pray, Love

“Maybe it will be here next week?” I ask her in Italian.
She shrugs: “Magari.”
Another untranslatable bit of Italian slang, meaning something between “hopefully” and “in
your dreams, sucker.”
Ah, maybe it’s for the best. I can’t even remember now what books I’d packed in the box
in the first place. Surely it was some stuff I thought I should study, if I were to truly understand
Italy. I’d packed that box full of all sorts of due-diligence research material about Rome that
just seems unimportant now that I’m here. I think I even loaded the complete unabridged text
of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into that box. Maybe I’m
happier without it, after all. Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of
my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?
Eat, Pray, Love