Jacob Bromberg
October Resident 2025
A Letter from Jacob Bromberg: This Real Beyond
Dear Villa Lena Readers,
I cannot divorce my time at Villa Lena from the personal upheaval I was experiencing before my arrival and, in truth, throughout my stay. My life had changed, drastically, and I undertook as best I could to embrace the wider perspective one friend had attempted to provide me with, quoting the English theologian John Henry Newman:
“To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”
As the Villa Lena Foundation’s merry Manager Gillian Donaldson drove me and another resident, the fantastically talented Issi Nanabeyin, from Pontedera station to the villa, I could not help but find myself overcome by the surrounding landscape — the profusion of hills creating layer upon layer of distance, the baths of mist slowly snaking through wooded valleys, the immense sky littered with Renaissance clouds.
The beauty shocked an emotional distance into me, or rather pushed aside the more leaden emotions, allowing me to receive the natural aesthetic experience in dumbstruck awe.
Over the following weeks, I would regularly think to myself, “of course linear perspective originated here.” And though the environment continually enticed me to give myself over to it, what I was living internally was anything but linear. I had always imagined the famous five
stages of grief as progressive steps out of an abyss, leading back to solid ground, but they are in fact more akin to winds blowing in currents and constantly giving way to one another.
Watching the wind chase clouds across the sky was one of my favorite pastimes on the bright
October days at Villa Lena. I don’t think this has so much to do with grief as the fact that I can
be a glacially slow writer and often find myself needing to throw my attention elsewhere so
that the depths can continue their work and perhaps deposit a new line of thought onto the
shore of my consciousness. Writing a collection of poetry concerned with the workings of value, with our ways of making meaning, means watching clouds is serious business.
The phenomenon of pareidolia – the interpretation of form, pattern, or meaning where there is, ostensibly, none – is not only a perennial yet novel entertainment, it is the crossroads where the gambler and the mystic meet, where one can be undecided between chance and fate, or on the contrary, where one can begin to pivot from one paradigm to the other.
In the end, I did not write any poems about cloud gazing, though I’ve promised myself to do so later.
As the season began to change, there were days that saw the landscape enveloped in fog, when the villa and studios were themselves encompassed in cloud. Living inside the clouds suited me well, lending itself less to projecting outward than to settling into moods.
The closer our departure, the more deeply each resident seemed to sink into a cloak of their own moodiness, as though a retreat into oneself was a necessary step to weather the transition back to the “real world” beyond.
Writing this letter now from that real beyond, the linear retrospective it creates feels to me so slight in comparison with my memory of the time and the atmosphere in all of its particulars; and that memory is still just a wan impression of what it was to be present.
That is, of course, part of the nature of story and memory, which I had been wrestling with in my mourning.
One of the poems I wrote during my residency, “Fairy Gold,” begins with an instruction:
Read upon waking. Read at midnight. Repeat in time.
and its first four quatrains read:
Let the clock spin,
no hour can be saved,
and only so much weather
can fit the sky today.
A day is just too thin,
and you and I too broad,
is why we trust in years
then poured out to night and fog.
Fairy gold shines
a dreamwhile in the hand,
witching as a vanity,
as when our love began.
The past is what survives
of the present – looking back,
I scour each regret down to
a stainless artifact.
A treasure obtained in an enchanted time and place that cannot retain its value without the enchantment, fairy gold turns to withered leaves when its bearer returns to the mundane world.
Part of the magic of Villa Lena, however, is that the metaphorical gold it offers inhabits you and does not dull once you have left, but changes with you, within you.
I do not know if I have changed often, but I did live.
— Jacob Bromberg
