Trekhprudny Lane

Back in Moscow, just in time for the two-week winter holiday to begin. Everyone is off work, everyone is in a frenzy of shopping and preparation, but (you won't be surprised to hear) it is hard for me to sense any merriness. Instead I keep imagining the blocs filled bottom to top with stacked families, each sitting around a dressed table in slippers, smoking like chimneys and drinking for days, eating fish and gloppy sweets and mayonnaise-based "salads," all lipstick and tinsel and ashtrays and a TV perpetually on in some corner. 

I too am boxed. I never thought I'd live this way; from apartment to apartment over the past fifteen years, I've taken a sort of pride, actually, in devising ways to keep feeling in touch with the outside, the weather, whatever birds and trees happened to live nearby. I've known the value of vacant lots, and searched out pockets of natural life in some very urban wastelands. I know this so-called dead season, this hibernation season, is actually full of activity, and of beauty. But here, it's impossible. Too dense, too loud, too dirty, too lawless, and no planning: almost no unpaved surfaces. There is no rich parallel universe to our own, the human world, here. What lives alongside us in this place is not independent or indigenous; it is only the detritus from our life indoors -- discarded things and animals, corrupted soil and sky. I panic when I realize that for the duration of our stay here, I'll be completely detached from the outdoors, shut off from natural sights, sounds, smells, events -- full sensory deprivation -- the very problem that David Abram describes so well in Spell of the Sensuous. I realize that it is gratuitously painful to read that book in Moscow, but I always come back to it, I have for years, as a sort of lifeline to values I hope to actually live some day. 

So I'm hanging around on craigslist for university towns, daydreaming about a sublet for spring and summer in some smallish place surrounded by corn... and still looking through endless vacation websites (Spain? Turkey?), sifting through the usual criteria ("close to bars and the beach," "dishwasher included") for a remote rocky place that has not been rehabbed and is not easily accessible from the airport. In a few months, maybe I'll be able to see stars again, or smell dirt.