Lessons From the Kissing Booth

In Roman banquet halls they would paint roses on the ceiling, a sign to anyone who looked up that whatever was said under the influence of wine would remain a secret. The story of sub rosa is a complicated one dates back to a misunderstanding of a picture. The Greeks and then the Romans saw Egypt's Horus, the child-god whose symbol was a rose, making a finger to mouth gesture, in Egyptian the hieroglyph for child, and mistook it as a gesture of silence. So they called him Harpocrates and gave him the job of taking the rose that Aphrodite gave to Eros in exchange for keeping everyone's secrets. This seems like a poor exchange and an awfully murky path, but the end result is the possibility of lining our skies with roses and keeping everything under them safe.

I woke up today thinking about this, along a rather circuitous route. Today I'm going to meet a tiny baby nicknamed Ozzy. Thinking about this baby always makes me think of Shelley's poem "Ozymandius", which reminds me through a tattered old copy of "Prometheus Unbound" in Rome of Keats' last view. I was reading about sub rosa recently, and thinking about Keats made me comb through my memories for Rome for any rooms under the flowers.

We are planning for Paris, and so the only places I can think of are other places. Other places, and all the secrets they have to tell me.