Rome, part 1.

Greetings from the Eternal City! Rome is so lovely, in many ways, that it is often easy to forget that it is a city. Dirty, noisy, and crowded, as you’d expect. Anyway, I’m supposed to be writing a post. I’ll try to keep it brief so I can get back to being a dilettante. I am the owner of many, many pairs of Chuck Taylors. My love for them cannot be overstated. When I got ready to go out this morning I put on a pair that looks like this:

The Flash is one of my favorite superheroes. It’s only logical that I would wear him on my favorite shoe and every once in a while when I’m wearing these shoes, I’ll get a compliment or two on them. They’re nice shoes. But yesterday, I happened to be in the Vatican when I saw two men, obviously Catholic priests, gesturing toward me. I checked to see if I happened to be wearing a fedora, or if I was dressed like Psy. Maybe I had chosen to wear my Manchester United shirt on the day of a Rome derby at the Coppa Italia. It turns out that the answer was (d): none of the above.

It was my Chucks that had attracted their attention. In what sounds like an exceedingly strange joke, an American, an Irish priest and an Italian priest had a long conversation about shoes and comic books in a mix of Spanish, Italian and English. Imagine my delight to find that I had traveled to the other side of the world to find two people as excited to talk about superheroes as I was.

Our conversation began to sputter as it moved from sneakers and superheroes to superheroes and privatio boni, the privation of good, a theodicy which argues that good is much like light, whereas evil is like darkness. Thusly, evil represents simply the absence of good, and not an entity unto itself, rendering the “whence cometh evil?” question moot. As you might imagine, this is a difficult topic about which to be articulate when you lack advanced skills in a language.

We did manage to make words out of the idea in that in comics, evil seems to rise as the result of good. This is an oft-stated problem, centering around how superheroes seem to attract supervillians. I wondered aloud if some superheroes could be thought of as angels, and the conversation shifted briefly to Islam, wherein angels definitively lack free will. The conversation died right about there.

I was left with lots of thoughts on the subject, which I’ll share in my next post. For now, I’m very pleased with how deep a conversation I stumbled across all because I wore a pair of shoes.