PF took this picture looking out over Goris.
The test included an essay question: ‘write about your fall holidays.’. Although I correctly translated ‘vacation’ into ‘holiday’, I forgot to change ‘fall’ into ‘autumn’. One of the students asked about it. Made me think about what a ‘fall holiday’ would be: bungee-jumping – or Halloween.
When the sun is shining in the morning it is warm enough to drink coffee on the balcony with a book, perhaps something on regional politics, and listen to the swifts cross the sky. I had thought at first they were starlings, because the starlings paused on the wire linking the apartment building to the police station, but after watching them for a few mornings, it seems they are swifts after all. At nine o’clock one can see the last of the schoolchildren running desperately to fifth school, anxious glances darting back to the loitering policemen, or perhaps even further behind to the parent darkening a doorway or window. One can follow the progress of the sun by watching the bedding – mattresses and pillows – move from balcony to balcony, plumply perched on railings, soaking in the sun, from east to south to west.
We make the rounds, going from house to office to house to office, from tea to coffee to tea again with fruit and runny syrup. Mostly we talk about the weather. It is a never-ending source of conversation. The weather and health are the sacred fonts of social feeling. One is always cold, or has just caught a cold, or is recovering from having caught a cold. It’s an excellent excuse to practice one’s tenses.
We have winter two times here: once before spring, and then again after spring.
The room is warm and smells of expatriates, a peculiar blend of locally unavailable spices and foreign laundry detergent. There is a pile of completed books by the door, dwarfed by the stacks still unread beneath the window in the opposite wall. I am finishing up a few things I’ve been meaning to do for many months, small projects, minute tidyings, a scribble here and there. I thought I’d lost a handkerchief, but I hadn’t. There is coffee in a thermos and milk – carried 68 km, aseptic packed, from the nearest market that stocks such things – in the fridge, which has been turned on in deference to the unseasonably warm weather.
On Sunday it was warm enough to air the bedding, the sky blue and clear, ice thawing on the roadway. We stacked everything outside in the sun, wool-filled blankets and mattresses fluffed and drooping, feather-filled pillows plumply perched on the balcony railing. We groom the bedding, turning it, rotating it to absorb air and sunshine, the smell of smoke and winter. Toward evening, we bring the bedding back inside, the mattresses softer than ever, the blankets rested and ready for sleep, and everything soaked with soporific freshness.
The rooster runs across the bare uneven ground towards the barn like a samurai from some black and white film you can half remember seeing, sunlight pooling on his rusty black feathers.
In the kitchen there is hope for another cup of coffee, thick with sugar, and lavash with a hard-boiled egg, yolk apricot-colored, and a pinch of salt.
But the chariot waits outside the church and there is no stay, even for the purple.
There is something outrageous in a person’s misdirecting a traveller who has lost his way and then leaving him to himself in error, yet what is that compared with causing someone to go astray in himself? The lost traveller, after all, has a consolation that the country around him is constantly changing, and with every change is born a new hope of finding a way out. A person who goes astray inwardly has less room for manoeuvre; he soon finds he is going round in a circle from which he cannot escape.1
– Kierkegaard, Either/Or
(but taken from The Seducer’s Diary, p.6).
I’m holding the envelope in my hand, the envelope which says where I’m going to spend the next few years. It feels like I’m holding my future, that it’s fragile and if I look at it incorrectly it will spontaneously combust or dissolve into dust. I know this is not true. I know that it is just a few pieces of paper in a Fedex envelope, and that even the words on those pieces of paper will not materially change my manner of living in any immediate way when I read them. Nor really will the contents be a surprise – they will just fill in the blanks. I know my future (short-term, anyhow, and barring accident): in two months I will be going to Armenia, where I will receive training and begin learning the Armenian language. In five months I will transfer to ______________________ and begin teaching, which I will do for twenty-four months following. After that, __________________…
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ego hoc feci mm–mmx
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