palace

Let me tell you about eudemonia (word won’t let me spell it any other way) some other time.

I think everyone here should drive on the left, just for my convenience – who cares if they don’t get it?!

Work is … an invention to waste time that might otherwise be spent productively.

There’s a freedom I feel that most other people won’t get, unless perhaps they’re doing something like me, although I’ve had it since…forever.

Diaspora of 1.

Ok, so I have my silly little “problems”, like …(insert a non-problem here), I don’t have the daily grind and pressure of mortgages and food on the table and lust and looking good and career and…all of that grown-up stuff. Never been part of the grown-up world and don’t think I ever will. I can just wander around unconscious and stumble upon whatever happens to trip me up at the time. Apart from the beard, I could be Forrest Gump. But one thing has struck me, and that’s the lack of a focal point in this type of existence. I’ve said goodbye to everything that was my past, save my friends and family, who remain a constant constellation (urk!) but over a horizon I cannot see and ahead of me is, quite simply, the unknown. I have no idea who I’ll meet, what they’ll be like, where I’ll be, what my plan is (I don’t have one any more!) or anything at all. I just live from day to day and, occasionally, in my imagination, in another time and timeframe altogether. I have no compass. I have, at times, been fascinated but also baulked at the idea of going into a flotation tank; total sensory deprivation, but this seems a step in that direction.

Certainly some interesting things happen to your sense of self and identity. You feel as though you’re a refugee for a second, until you realise how you trivialise the aftershock that those (genuine) refugees, who may never have known peace save in fitful dreams, have had. There’s the baby in the outsized body syndrome. And not just the obvious.

The frustration of knowing that the perfectly good sense you’re making (I’ve toned my language down to ‘normalise’) is just gibberish, so you don’t even try. There’s the feeling you get as you walk through an archway and there, right in front of you is the green and white faзade of The Hermitage that wraps you in its verdant span and envelops you in awe.

There’s the contradiction between a people sometimes seemingly so wrapped up in themselves that they don’t see that it’s as though the doors to time have been opened and the world has moved on past pre-Revolution, although part of this city of 5,000,000 don’t seem to recognise or perhaps even accept that, and the desire to make a quick buck with the latest technology, fashion and still newfound freedom all of which still sometimes smack of 20 years ago. The way the outside world, the West, is twisted here is like the whole place, neither East nor West (and this is St Petersburg), neither now nor then, neither…neither. It seems its way.

Come to Russia?
Yes.
St Petersburg?
Definitely.

But learn the language or ‘go tourist class’ and maybe just get a culture blast.

And let its spirit take you where it will. The journey will be worth it.

(Courtesy of the unofficial St P tourist board). ______________________________________________________________