businesses: trendy restaurants and shops, some shops dealing exclusively in amber. And yet, the old still informs these places, deeper than skin. The surfaces must have been renewed many times, after all, in five hundred years. But the shape of things, the deeper patterns, have persisted, and now are the very reason that the surfaces are renewed, for tourists who flock to see the place, for natives who feel that the identity of their city is bound up in the old irregularities of these streets. Still, the feeling that the newness of the surfaces impairs the authenticity of the old town is no doubt widespread. Here and there, I see places where the restorers have left neat cutouts in the new stucco to reveal the real old bricks or stones underneath, which tacitly acknowledges the difficulties.
Still, I like walking in color, the gold trapezoids of reflected light shimmering on the streets, on the walls. And later, standing in weather suddenly threatening, I can hardly credit how gorgeous the Baroque spires of St. Catherine’s look, picked out by the sun, pink and white against a blue-black sky. Then the rain does fall. Still, I feel lucky to have seen the big pink church in such a light. But the odds are good for such luck in Vilnius; the low skyline is thick with spires, towers, belfries, and domes. Strolling the ever-turning lanes of the old town, they loom up suddenly, and often, and drop from sight just as suddenly. An old-town layout makes small provision for broad vistas. Perhaps this is one of the attractions, the way the turning streets serve up a new prospect every few steps, and in Vilnius this impression is strengthened by the changing paint, the ribbon of ice cream colors unscrolling on either side of the street.
Back in my room, I look out into the half-light of what feels like it should be night but is not. The laundry is in. I’ve been out walking all day long. Several days. On the bent streets I now know my way, if not at every turn, at most. The maze is coming down. The heightened attention that a maze calls up, that itself brightens or darkens the world, would ease, and I would be a familiar of this place, if I were staying on. But I’m a traveler, and soon I’ll be exploring different streets, in Tallinn. I’ll be leaving with a little of the strangeness still on.
Strangeness is good, almost our only hope against the opacity of presumption, that thick lens. I’ve been wondering about why I’m here. I’ve been wondering about what this kind of travel is all about. I know my desire to walk the bent streets is a shared desire, that the place itself has been restored to call out to the likes of me, to tourists. Perhaps that’s troubling, in a way, the familiar irony: that the authenticity of the Baltic old towns is threatened by the people who come to see them, and by the people catering to those visitors, until the whole place becomes so ersatz you might as well be touring Las Vegas. But that’s just so, and the dynamics not so hard to understand. The desire that’s catered to, however, is harder to touch. I suppose that whipping boy Romanticism will have to take another turn at the post, that the hard but true realities of the industrial and now the postindustrial age will be seen to have called up yet again sentimental reconstructions of what was and has been lost. And likely there is something to that, but this argument is so dismissive it discourages thinking; indeed, it discourages making the trip. Still, we take these journeys. And for the most part the impulse to visit goes unexamined, travel in and of itself is seen as a sufficient reason to go, and this is perhaps the most obscuring presumption of all.
Okay, I admit to having a theory about the attraction. It takes for granted that life at home doesn’t entirely satisfy, that if it did we wouldn’t take to the roads. Of course, life lets us down in any number of ways, personal ways, but I’m thinking now about something bigger than that, something cultural, which is not to single out our ways as peculiarly deficient. The deficiency, according to my theory, must be universal. As far back as I can remember, it has seemed self-evident to me that people are fundamentally the same now as they ever were, that a baby transported across the millennia into this now would grow up just as modern as the rest of us. And, to turn it around, send a baby back five or ten thousand years, perhaps even thirty thousand years, and that baby would find its way into the culture there, would grow to be an adult of that time. Rather than a Paiute trailing a travois through the alkaline dust of the Great Basin, a man signing for a box on his front porch, making small talk with the guy from UPS. Rather than a man twisting the top off a bottle of seltzer, a man carrying a water jug through a low door in Harappa, in the Indus valley, five thousand years ago. Sitting down with a cheap paperback in front of the gas logs, or a monk isolating himself in the rock hills over the Egyptian desert. Driving I-68 over the mountains and on toward D.C., or navigating the Australian outback by the songlines. Writing, or way back, spraying pigment through a straw at my splayed hand to leave a print on a wall in a cave in what we now call France. The accident of our birth, we say, meaning the when and the where and the to whom. And perhaps I don’t mean much more than that, just to acknowledge that whatever, whoever we are when our head crowns into this world, who and what we become is wildly dependent on that when and where. Soon enough the culture and the life-ways so fuse with that baby born into the world under prairie stars, or in a mud house in a Moroccan oasis, or in an American hospital, that all those other ways of being human, the great panoply of possible lives that newborn could have lived, get lost. I was a baby brought home to a white ranch house in a blue blanket in 1950, in Portland, Oregon; that was my accident. Out of the ways of being human, this way.
In saying yes to one way of living we say no to the myriad. No to a life of herding or hunting, no to seafaring, no to the raven people set flying by their shaman. No to the outcast, to the Untouchable, to life before the wheel. People we could have been, were, in fact, ready to be when we entered this world.
Was that sea of potential exhausted in making the one fish? Is the oblivion absolute? Or do we walk in a crowd of ghosts, our unrealized lives, their whispering a murmur just out of hearing? Not ghosts, maybe, but I think there is sometimes a responsiveness that has more to do with our unrealized potentials than with who we’ve become. Mostly the voices are the quiet voices of muted yearning, but occasionally they clamor, and one voice rises up to shout, Yes, yes; I didn’t realize such worlds existed when I said no to this.
We hear these voices most when traveling, away from the circumstances that half make us who we are; and, traveling alone, we hear them louder, no one there to remind us of our confining self. So travel attracts us, attracts me, by appealing to potentials that have gone unexpressed. Of course, we travel through space, time no more than the duration of the trip. It’s right now everywhere, sure. Time travel remains impossible. But that now is not simple; the life-ways of times long gone in one place are still practiced in another. In that sense, time is uneven. You don’t have to travel long to find fields worked with white bullocks, to watch the seeds of the coming harvest broadcast from human hands, to see offerings of rice and fruit, wicks burning in butter, rather than a tray going round fluttering with rumpled dollars. This is a reason for travel.
And life as it was lived leaves a mark, sometimes a distinct mark, in old buildings, old neighborhoods built to answer the needs of those other ways, a tradition and aesthetic ours no more. Walking such streets doesn’t always have to do with the past, but, responding, we sense something unused in us now, almost lost in the life we are living. This is good to know, even if, returning home, we seem to be restored to our former selves.
In Vilnius, the impulse to restore has called up, it seems almost at once, the impulse to vandalize. If Pilies Gatve keeps its paint refreshed, most of the old town alleys have been defaced by graffiti. It’s easy to imagine the sound of spray cans being shaken while the painters with rollers and brushes are still in sight, carrying their ladders away.
::
Tallinn
I arrive in Tallinn under the weather, with a headache. Migrainous, if not migraine. My inner weather mixes with the skies of Tallinn like soap and water shaken in a jar, gas fumes rising off a puddle, heat waves off a tarred road. A cloud rippling like a flag in the mind. Sick, too sick to see straight. In a less nauseous moment, I somehow manage to get to my room on Uus. By midnight, though I still hurt, the world has separated from me and looks
