Each night, hundreds of exciting things are going on in my fair city, and even when I am expressly invited to partake in in one such activity, I usually weasel my way out of it. It’s cold/It’s far away/I am not feeling well/I had a long day/I am a insistently joyless human. Et cetera.

However, when I have an hour to kill in downtown Boston, and a man of known genius is showing up for a free lecture during that exact hour, and once, this man of known genius welcomed myself and 20 other giggling girl classmates into his lovely Vermont studio?

I go.

Quick bio: David Macaulay is a trained architect, an illustrator, a children’s book creator. Although he is most well-known for his books of narrative architectural nonfiction (Castle, Pyramid, Cathedral, etc) and his gloriously informative and clever reference tome The Way Things Work, he also won a Caldecott award for his 1991 Black and White, and also won a Macarthur Genius Grant.

I have no idea what Mr. Macaulay will be speaking on when I arrive. The crowd is not nearly as filled as I would like, but there are folks present, including an exuberant man who laughs – no, he guffaws – at Mr. Macaulay’s every joke. But I am pleased when his Powerpoint flips over to a document camera, and Mr. Macaulay begins to draw as he speaks, a Roman square.

He can communicate verbally and visually, effortlessly, simultaneously. A wonder.

The rest of his presentation might be confused with a vacation slideshow. Mr. Macaulay has gone to Italy more than once, and has taken pictures in the way that a trained architect might – noting interesting buildings, features, arrangements. This is old territory for him: he has written and illustrated not one but two books for children about Rome.

But still – it was someone else’s vacation slideshow. A Man of Known Genius’s slideshow, but a slideshow nonetheless.

However, as a Man of Known Genius is wont to do, Mr. Macaulay dragged me along through his trip, through his city, through his thought processes, and then suddenly, suddenly, suddenly the only place I’ve ever wanted to visit in the world is Rome.

He talks about the bones of human existence – the buildings and streets that rose up as a way to structure human life, to allow people to share and sell the things they need, water, food, to bring them together.

This structure exists underneath our usual perception, at once invisible and absolutely physical. Walls, cement, columns, cornices, streets, fountains, sidewalks – they take up space, but we don’t see them.

He talks about why he goes through the hassle to take his kids to Europe. “To imbue these places with memories of family.” To allow his children to see, in the walls and the details, themselves and their human role in the larger public history. The world not as a playground in which they have been plopped – free to explore, play, destroy – but an organic, changing human fabric. You exist in a larger context, your kids exist in a larger context, and for Mr. Macaualy, Rome brings all of this to the surface for adults and children alike.

A good ten or fifteen minutes after I dropped my skepticism and fell under the spell of Rome, I had a second realization – I am going. I am going to Rome.

Or at least, it is possible that I am going. Watch me second guess. But at the time of this lecture in early October, it had been a few months since The Boy and I sat down and talked about a honeymoon and landed on Italy, on Rome. I am second-guessing – we won’t have the money, we (read: I) won’t have the balls, I will defer and take a nice beachy, resorty, all-inclusive trip.

I would be excited to go to the beach, to take a cruise. I am scared, however, to go to Europe.

But maybe I am afraid to see myself as a part of a larger, human, organic fabric.

And maybe I will go to Rome.

In case you doubt Mr. Macaulay’s Known Genius, here is his Ted Talk. On Rome.

(And back from 2008 when Ted Talks were not so generously distributed across the human population)

(For what it’s worth)