This is a book of journeys. Most books about travel describe the great arc of one heroic adventure or the rewards and frustrations of digging deep in one place. Travel literature is rich with wonderful books of both sorts. While this is the kind of travel we most often read about, it’s not the kind of travel we often do. I travel when I can, trips of two or three weeks, a month maybe. The essays in this book have grown out of such trips, have been called up by the various worlds I’ve been lucky enough to travel through. But as much as to places, these essays speak to the experience of travel, to what it means to shake loose of your at-home identity, to carry all you need of your life in a worn daypack, to step footloose into a world unfamiliar, and in doing so, to catch a glimpse of where you’ve come from as a strange place, too.
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The sudden spring. Twilight at 11:00 p.m. and twilight at 2:00 a.m. A spring condensed in the far north, the bloom on, the different new greens, from near yellow through chartreuse to leaf green to pine. The beautiful woods, the silver birches in the road cut, behind them the red-barked small pines and a tree I don’t know, its trunk the color of old pewter and its new leaves ruddy, that other green, the blood of spring. This is the third week of May, this is the Baltic coast, the cold sea, gray or steel blue, just there. This bus driving through the rushing season. Two weeks ago the ground was rough with ice, they say. Now the birdhouses are loud with cheeping. Arriving in the bloom and not long for this place, it will always be spring here for me.
Forest and farmsteads. Around the farm buildings the brightest thing the stacks of new-cut firewood, silver and salmon, opened by the raw strokes of the axe. It won’t always be spring for the farmers, already wood-making for next winter, winter just past. The fields green, green, or a new-tilled brown, or absolute yellow, rape seed in flower, I think, not sure, not knowing much for sure, passing through.
This is the day earth promised in darkness. Now, the earth speaks glory. The little leaves like girls, boys, so small and frail, alive with the first impulse. I look through glass at all that, going by, my own face white with winter, reflected, still, in front of the rushing, renewed world. This is age, and to age earth speaks a different word.
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Vilnius
Everything bent—in the old town, anyway, and this is what I’ve come for, to be reminded that the built world hasn’t always been so square. Streets plotted on a grid, structures obeying the rule, I get tired of it. I begin to desire that other thing, buildings bending with the arc of an alley, most every building connected with the building next door. And I find myself packing a bag, setting out, just to walk such streets. They must have seemed like good streets to walk for a long time, for millennia. If you take the long view, my desire can hardly be construed as eccentric. Yet we rarely do take the long view, and I too was surprised when years ago I visited ancient Akrotiri on Santorini. The old town there is very old, Minoan, buried in ash like Pompeii but some seventeen hundred years before catastrophe rained from the sky at the foot of Vesuvius. Ancient Akrotiri is an archaeological site now, and the eruption that buried it left ash so deep that you enter the town by walking down, into the ground. The archaeologists have had the site roofed, which is estranging, but in spite of that what startles at ancient Akrotiri is just how familiar, how old-towny, the place seems. I remember how arrested I felt, walking into the little triangular “square,” where the alleys meet in an irregular junction, registering the absolute rightness of that place, knowing it had been a place of chance meetings, of assignations, of talk, thirty-six hundred years ago. But ancient Akrotiri, while uniquely well preserved, was not the first such town. It would have been already the inheritor of a mature building tradition, originating who knows where or when but imagined out of the ground by people finding a way to live together.
In Vilnius, the imagining was not done all at once, either. But, I’d been hearing for years that the old towns of the Baltic capitals were largely intact, as if stilled in amber through the long centuries, and I’d come to have a look, to see if the towns would answer, would speak to my desire to find myself again walking the curved alleys of what feels like memory. My expectations were tempered, however; I knew no place is exempt from time, from history, and certainly not the capitals of Lithuania, or Latvia, or Estonia, where armies have marched, to and fro, for centuries.
In Vilnius, I’ve found a room off Bernardinu, in a quiet and irregular courtyard, where an old woman shuffles out in her slippers to arrange her laundry on a few yards of clothesline several times a day. I don’t forget her when I walk through the passageway out to Bernardinu, into streets dominated by people decidedly young. The old town in Vilnius is being restored. It has been undergoing a major restoration for years, another kind of springtime, I guess, but restoration displaces old people even as it renews the old buildings. The old town in Vilnius has only been partially restored, but the old people have long since retreated into ramshackle courtyards. They walk the expensive streets looking dispossessed, looking more out of place than the tourists.
On Bernardinu, I walk down. At first the sweep is right and then a long leftward curve, down to Pilies Gatve—Castle Street—the main artery of old Vilnius. Crossing under the arch over Benardinu onto Pilies, I step out of the quiet of a residential street into the commotion of a world public and commercial. Pilies has always had a commercial character, and here always is a long time. Many of the buildings still standing on the cobbled street date from the sixteenth century. But maybe not the cobbles themselves, which look too cleanly cut for old. The shape of the street itself, however, has the real old-feel, the way it tapers and widens, like something grown. I walk up it often, admiring the buildings. Pedestrians dominate the street, a few walking fast, going somewhere, but many more strolling. Their own paths up or down the sinuous street shift side to side as whim suggests. I wonder if Pilies Gatve has ever before in its long history looked so gay, so bright. Closely tended, the stucco facades of the buildings all are smooth, and the paint as delicious looking as the tubs in an ice cream shop, yellow and mint green, raspberry and sherbet orange, a blueberry purple, a vanilla white, and one blackish building, suggesting licorice.
Whether the buildings are Gothic or Baroque, they each have a share in the pastel paint that contributes so strongly to the feel of the street. The colors scroll by as you walk, striped by shadows and lit by the watery light of the far north angling in over the rooftops. Pilies must be the most fully renovated street in the old town, and it raises the question, of course, about what’s really old here, not the plaster, not the paint, not the paving stones; the surfaces are new, as are many of the 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