Autumn arrives
Autumn arrives, a change felt in the composition of the air, the sound of the laughter on the street, the smell through the open window next to my bed, the feeling of the rough wool sweater from home against my skin. Despite the chill, or perhaps because of it, flies enter my room during the warm day through my screenless first-storey window, remaining hidden until night, when the window is shut again, and the day's accumulated warmth, fortified by the heat of the incandescent lightbulbs, brings them out to fly in inexhaustable crazy figures over my head, one dropping occasianally from its dizzying flight to attack my ear as I try to fall asleep, bringing me fully awake. I kill them without remorse, these flies, my floor littered with their six-legged corpses, until I surrepticiously take the vacuum while my xozaika (host mother - the "x" is pronounced like the German "ch" like at the end of Bach) is out of the house and dispose of them. With a sense of both comfort and dissapointment, I realize that autumn is the same everywhere. There may not be the smell of apple pie at home, or a leafpile at every corner, but these things were always secondary, subsequent; the smell of пирожки and fresh bread on the street will do as well, and I never much enjoyed jumping in leaf piles to begin with. There are the early mornings whn you can see your breath, and afternoons when it's pleasently only a little too cold without a sweater, and the sun still burns with the remembered heat of summer, though the air bites in anticipation of winter. I took the bus Friday morning down to the ГЭС dam which divides the half mile-wide Angara which flows from Baikal, from the Angara which trickles through Irkutsk and north. I didn't take my camera. People - and I don't think it's just Americans - have an obsessive need to take photographs of everything, making it the point of the trip: photographs to solidify, to make concrete; so that in the end the photographs are more substantial, more relevant to the experience, than the place, than the experience itself. The dam was beautiful. or the view was, anyway: the forest stretching away to the barely visable mountains which must be Baikal. Something I have already come to love about this city is how the city just ends, and the forest begins. BEYOND the dam, particularly on the west bank, there is little other than forest, and river. And this I love. This, and the way the сибиряки (Siberians) arew more inclined to be helpful when I stammer out a tortured Russian sentance I have spent five minutes thinking how to say than they are to be fed up and annoyed. Amused, is more common. We are given both English and Russian menus at restaurants, without having said a work (our clothing betraying us before our accents), but they often show a second of surprise as we order from the Russian, though perhaps it is more surprise rather that we continue to converse amongst ourselves in the same broken Russian that we just ordered in. They usually humor us, though they titter in the corners and behind the bar.
As I think of it, the fact is that I can't imagine living anywhere else right now; for all of its difficulty, the choice to take Russian, to go to Russia, to go to Siberia, was right, was what I needed. When we flew into Paris on the way to Moscow, Lizi and I briefly - and half-jokingly, but only half - dicussed jumping ship and leaving Charles De Gaulle not on Air France for Moscow, on on a bus for the French capitol. A week and a half ago, she mentioned that agina briefly, only to say, "Matty, I'm really glad we're not in Paris." (In Russian; language police, не волнуйтесь!) And, having not thought about it since leaving the aging French airport, I found that I, too, felt that way. And not even in the sense that I don't really care for Paris (I don't). But that, in spite of my love of French - made more acute by years without it and the newfound abundance of post-Iraq French-bashers - I chose this route, which has landed me in a place I could earlier not likely have pronounced, let alone found on a map, in a country both still reeling from the stroke which fifteen years ago ended its communism and accelerating blindly into the future, speaking a language as illogical, convoluted, and beautiful as the people who speak it.
Lizi, Sarah, Colleen, and I rode on a train yesterday which went south from Irkutsk to the very base of Lake Baikal, and then slowly made its way up the shore to the Angara, stopping every hour or so to allow people to picnic, wander, and take pictures. I awoke before the sun, eating in darkness, and taking a трамвай (old-fashioned trolley) so packed with people that the ticket-babushka had to elbow people around to get through. We met outside the train station, a charming light blue pre-Soviet building, with a number of unfortunate Soviet additions. When we entered the characteristically overheated cabin, we comparted the excessive amounts of food each of us had been packed. The highlights being Colleen's chicken - as in half of a large chicken - and Sarah's veggies, surely a week's worth. The sun, as we left, had only just risen. Once we had travelled maybe an hour and a half to the south of the lake, we saw nothing but breathtaking views until the sun went down. It was too much, in a way, to look at. We are so accustomed to seeing huge pictured mountains and breathtaking scenes that to be in the middle of one has the numb haze of unreality and scepticism. Colleen and I hiked up, on one of the longer stops, to a ridge which jutted out into the lake; I remember being able to do nothing but grin like a raving idiot and once in a while punctuate the silene with a "wow." As far as we could see, north and south, were snow-covered mountains diving into the water on the far shore, and, though I did this time bring my camera, the view was so much bigger than the viewfinder that I found myself really having to search for photographs. I remarked to Colleen that it was too much to take in. I would need to hike there for days, live there for months, be raised there on the shores and in the mountains to really see them, let alone to know or understand them. There is, i have decided, such a thing as a place which is too beautiful to take in. I know now why the Buryat worship Baikal as their god, the holiest place on their earth. Because when you cannot know a place by seeing it, all that is left to do is worship it. And I was unable even to see it, blinded as I am by lack of time and the numbness of being accustomed to pictures of the most beautiful places on Earth. To be surrounded by the most awe-inspiring place which I have ever seen is both breathtaking and disenchanting. Every part of me wanted to stay, to sleep on the shore and wake to the sun rising over the lake, and try to see it. But, each time as we piled back into the stuffy train at the harsh sound of the whistle coming from each end of the blue-and-white string of carriages, I would not look out the window, preferring to chat with Colleen about professors, Seattle, our pre-college lives, to avoid being reminded of the untouchable, unthinkable beauty passing for hours by us. On reaching the Angara, in early evening, we had a little scare, as we didn't know how to get home, but a friend of Lizi's xozaika helped us onto a ferry to Lisvyanka, where we waited to see if there was a place on a bus to Irkutsk. Fortunately for us, there was an empty bus, due to a mistake, so we had a private ride back to the center, where we split up for our respective houses and xozaiki.
I just finished (thanks to Ash) an amazing novel, and even if you aren't looking for a good book to read (though I don't know anyone who isn't), you should all read "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri. She recently won the Pulitzer Prize for "Interpreter of Maladies," a collection of stories. Reading "The Namesake" in Russia was, in three ways, fitting. First, the hero's name is Gogol Ganguli, named for that unfortunate and brilliant Russian author by his father, whose life was saved by a page from a collection of Gogol's stories before moving from India to Boston. Second, the novel, in several ways and several places, deals with the switch from one culture to another. And last, I saw, in odd ways, my life reflected in Lahiri's writing. Though I have little connection to Boston, and less to New York City, the two places where the novel mostly takes place, I saw glimmers of myself, my family, in the people who Gogol meets, the way he feels. She writes, to my mind, the most convincing male character by a female author I have ever read. I do not often, regardless of how much a book affectsme, cry while reading. But there were two sections, oddly enough, though not coincidentally taking place in New Hampshire and on Cape Cod, respectively, where I was forced to stop reading and wait, shaking silently in my bed, until my eyes cleared enough to resume reading. There was something undefinably and strangely elegant about her simple, present-tense prose, which was affective to the point where I couldn't sleep without reading ten pages from "Angels and Demons" in Russian in order to clear my head, as "The Namesake" left me in a strange mood after reading my painfully rationed two chapters a night. In any event, read it! This does, of course, leave me with only one book in English left on my shelf, having finished now "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" (also brilliant, albeit less affecting, and a must-read) and "The Namesake." "Rodger's Version" by Updike, is all I have left, and then all my reading will be in Russian, having already started "Angels and Demons," which is a wonderfully silly and light read, and which I don't have to know every word because, having read "The Da Vinci Code," I already basically know what's going to happen in a Dan Brown novel. And I have made the wonderful discovery that Chekhov is both one of my very favorite authors, and almost laughable easy to read in Russian - something liek Hemingway must be like in English. So that should hold me for a while. If any of you Russian-speakers has another suggestion, send it along.
Much love to all
Matty
As I think of it, the fact is that I can't imagine living anywhere else right now; for all of its difficulty, the choice to take Russian, to go to Russia, to go to Siberia, was right, was what I needed. When we flew into Paris on the way to Moscow, Lizi and I briefly - and half-jokingly, but only half - dicussed jumping ship and leaving Charles De Gaulle not on Air France for Moscow, on on a bus for the French capitol. A week and a half ago, she mentioned that agina briefly, only to say, "Matty, I'm really glad we're not in Paris." (In Russian; language police, не волнуйтесь!) And, having not thought about it since leaving the aging French airport, I found that I, too, felt that way. And not even in the sense that I don't really care for Paris (I don't). But that, in spite of my love of French - made more acute by years without it and the newfound abundance of post-Iraq French-bashers - I chose this route, which has landed me in a place I could earlier not likely have pronounced, let alone found on a map, in a country both still reeling from the stroke which fifteen years ago ended its communism and accelerating blindly into the future, speaking a language as illogical, convoluted, and beautiful as the people who speak it.
Lizi, Sarah, Colleen, and I rode on a train yesterday which went south from Irkutsk to the very base of Lake Baikal, and then slowly made its way up the shore to the Angara, stopping every hour or so to allow people to picnic, wander, and take pictures. I awoke before the sun, eating in darkness, and taking a трамвай (old-fashioned trolley) so packed with people that the ticket-babushka had to elbow people around to get through. We met outside the train station, a charming light blue pre-Soviet building, with a number of unfortunate Soviet additions. When we entered the characteristically overheated cabin, we comparted the excessive amounts of food each of us had been packed. The highlights being Colleen's chicken - as in half of a large chicken - and Sarah's veggies, surely a week's worth. The sun, as we left, had only just risen. Once we had travelled maybe an hour and a half to the south of the lake, we saw nothing but breathtaking views until the sun went down. It was too much, in a way, to look at. We are so accustomed to seeing huge pictured mountains and breathtaking scenes that to be in the middle of one has the numb haze of unreality and scepticism. Colleen and I hiked up, on one of the longer stops, to a ridge which jutted out into the lake; I remember being able to do nothing but grin like a raving idiot and once in a while punctuate the silene with a "wow." As far as we could see, north and south, were snow-covered mountains diving into the water on the far shore, and, though I did this time bring my camera, the view was so much bigger than the viewfinder that I found myself really having to search for photographs. I remarked to Colleen that it was too much to take in. I would need to hike there for days, live there for months, be raised there on the shores and in the mountains to really see them, let alone to know or understand them. There is, i have decided, such a thing as a place which is too beautiful to take in. I know now why the Buryat worship Baikal as their god, the holiest place on their earth. Because when you cannot know a place by seeing it, all that is left to do is worship it. And I was unable even to see it, blinded as I am by lack of time and the numbness of being accustomed to pictures of the most beautiful places on Earth. To be surrounded by the most awe-inspiring place which I have ever seen is both breathtaking and disenchanting. Every part of me wanted to stay, to sleep on the shore and wake to the sun rising over the lake, and try to see it. But, each time as we piled back into the stuffy train at the harsh sound of the whistle coming from each end of the blue-and-white string of carriages, I would not look out the window, preferring to chat with Colleen about professors, Seattle, our pre-college lives, to avoid being reminded of the untouchable, unthinkable beauty passing for hours by us. On reaching the Angara, in early evening, we had a little scare, as we didn't know how to get home, but a friend of Lizi's xozaika helped us onto a ferry to Lisvyanka, where we waited to see if there was a place on a bus to Irkutsk. Fortunately for us, there was an empty bus, due to a mistake, so we had a private ride back to the center, where we split up for our respective houses and xozaiki.
I just finished (thanks to Ash) an amazing novel, and even if you aren't looking for a good book to read (though I don't know anyone who isn't), you should all read "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri. She recently won the Pulitzer Prize for "Interpreter of Maladies," a collection of stories. Reading "The Namesake" in Russia was, in three ways, fitting. First, the hero's name is Gogol Ganguli, named for that unfortunate and brilliant Russian author by his father, whose life was saved by a page from a collection of Gogol's stories before moving from India to Boston. Second, the novel, in several ways and several places, deals with the switch from one culture to another. And last, I saw, in odd ways, my life reflected in Lahiri's writing. Though I have little connection to Boston, and less to New York City, the two places where the novel mostly takes place, I saw glimmers of myself, my family, in the people who Gogol meets, the way he feels. She writes, to my mind, the most convincing male character by a female author I have ever read. I do not often, regardless of how much a book affectsme, cry while reading. But there were two sections, oddly enough, though not coincidentally taking place in New Hampshire and on Cape Cod, respectively, where I was forced to stop reading and wait, shaking silently in my bed, until my eyes cleared enough to resume reading. There was something undefinably and strangely elegant about her simple, present-tense prose, which was affective to the point where I couldn't sleep without reading ten pages from "Angels and Demons" in Russian in order to clear my head, as "The Namesake" left me in a strange mood after reading my painfully rationed two chapters a night. In any event, read it! This does, of course, leave me with only one book in English left on my shelf, having finished now "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" (also brilliant, albeit less affecting, and a must-read) and "The Namesake." "Rodger's Version" by Updike, is all I have left, and then all my reading will be in Russian, having already started "Angels and Demons," which is a wonderfully silly and light read, and which I don't have to know every word because, having read "The Da Vinci Code," I already basically know what's going to happen in a Dan Brown novel. And I have made the wonderful discovery that Chekhov is both one of my very favorite authors, and almost laughable easy to read in Russian - something liek Hemingway must be like in English. So that should hold me for a while. If any of you Russian-speakers has another suggestion, send it along.
Much love to all
Matty