February 02, 2005
Springtime in Saint Petersburg
Some pics from Natasha in Saint Petersburg. These brought back some happy memories. (Click to expand)
A picture taken few weeks ago when it was very warm. (the Neva in Saint Petersburg) |  |
And Dostoevsky-style place near my office. |  |
I've become so instantly nostalgic over certain cities... Saint Petersburg and Budapest hit me the hardest. Then Paris, Moscow and New York. San Francisco, London, Brussels, Chicago and Tallinn. I've been lucky.
I know I'm incredibly naiive of course--I willfully ignore everything that isn't just electric so I can let myself fall in love with a place. The more cities I've seen the more I'm aware of my own tactics. It's not so much a weariness I'm feeling now, as much as an expression of experience, a kind of veteran angst. It's like a recognition of the things that are common in all these places. A common humanity, most strongly expressed as desperation, I think.
This is brought on by a piece I read in "V.," by Pynchon, last night that really explained the feeling to me better than I could have explained it to myself. This bit takes place around 1905--a retired, well-traveled British agent is suddenly outcast and hunted, and tries to find a way to get out of Florence and disappear in the Italian countryside.
| He turned right and headed toward the Duomo. Tourists sauntered by, cabs clattered in the street. He felt isolated from a human community--even a common humanity--which he had regarded until recently as little more than a cant concept which liberals were apt to use in making speeches.
He watched the tourists gaping at the Campanile; he watched dispassionately without effort, curiously without commitment. He wondered at this phenomenon of tourism: what was it drove them to Thomas Cook & Son in ever-increasing flocks every year to let themselves in for the Campagna’s fevers, the Levant’s squalor, the septic foods of Greece? To return to Ludgate Circus at the desolate end of every season having caressed the skin of each alien place, a peregrine or Don Juan of cities but no more able to talk of any mistress’s heart than to cease keeping that interminable Catalogue, that non picciol’ libro. Did he not owe it to them, the lovers of skins, not to tell them about Vheissu, not even to let them suspect the suicidal fact that below the glittering integument of every foreign land there is a hard dead-point of truth and that in all cases, it is the same kind of truth, can be phrased in identical words? |
Under the glittering integument, a hard dead-point of common truth? Yes. Pynchon is right.
But it doesn't make these places any less grand, it doesn't stop the breath any less. We can keep the fragile Thrall intact. Just look at those pictures of Saint Petersburg. Thanks, Natasha.
Posted by case at February 2, 2005 10:41 PM