Subject
Re: Vyra (fwd)
Date
Body
From: "CHRISTOPHER L. KARP" <ckarp@welchlink.welch.jhu.edu>
I was briefly in St. Petersburg in mid-December for a conferecnce on
"Emerging and re-emerging infections in Russia". Amidst the gloom and
drizzle of my one free afternoon, I hired a taxi and drove south to find
Vyra (with a copy of SPEAK, MEMORY as a guide). My linguistic abilities
don't include Russian, a lapse mirrored in English by my driver, so it took
quite some time (with a side trip to Gryazno) before I got there. At
first it seemed to boil down to squat, ugly houses and careless trash
heaps in the middle of a badly martyred forest. But then I found the
avenue of oaks and, at least on a small scale, it fell into place--
beautiful bogs and birches (but no butterflies, no butterflies...). The
ruins of the foundation of the manor were overgrown, but visible in
places. The remains of the pavilion were unlocatable. A strange hillock
turned out to have been mentioned in Brian Boyd's biography, as was
the nearby dam on the Orodezh. The rushing water from that dam must have
been quite an aural "presence" in the garden of the manor, so at first I
was thrown off by it-- no mention that I could remember in SM (although I
did recall a mill in MARY). But of course the visual delights in VN's
writings aren't matched at the same level [quite a qualification!] by
aural ones. (Given how much my visual life expanded after reading VN,
I've always regretted, as a musician, his relative [same gross
qualification] insensitivity on the page to aural life.) All this is just
rambling, but I wonder if someone more in the know re: Vyra has been
there recently and can comment on what is left...
By the way, has anyone ever pointed out that "ada" means "there is" in
Indonesian?
Christopher Karp
Department of Medicine
Johns Hopkins University
I was briefly in St. Petersburg in mid-December for a conferecnce on
"Emerging and re-emerging infections in Russia". Amidst the gloom and
drizzle of my one free afternoon, I hired a taxi and drove south to find
Vyra (with a copy of SPEAK, MEMORY as a guide). My linguistic abilities
don't include Russian, a lapse mirrored in English by my driver, so it took
quite some time (with a side trip to Gryazno) before I got there. At
first it seemed to boil down to squat, ugly houses and careless trash
heaps in the middle of a badly martyred forest. But then I found the
avenue of oaks and, at least on a small scale, it fell into place--
beautiful bogs and birches (but no butterflies, no butterflies...). The
ruins of the foundation of the manor were overgrown, but visible in
places. The remains of the pavilion were unlocatable. A strange hillock
turned out to have been mentioned in Brian Boyd's biography, as was
the nearby dam on the Orodezh. The rushing water from that dam must have
been quite an aural "presence" in the garden of the manor, so at first I
was thrown off by it-- no mention that I could remember in SM (although I
did recall a mill in MARY). But of course the visual delights in VN's
writings aren't matched at the same level [quite a qualification!] by
aural ones. (Given how much my visual life expanded after reading VN,
I've always regretted, as a musician, his relative [same gross
qualification] insensitivity on the page to aural life.) All this is just
rambling, but I wonder if someone more in the know re: Vyra has been
there recently and can comment on what is left...
By the way, has anyone ever pointed out that "ada" means "there is" in
Indonesian?
Christopher Karp
Department of Medicine
Johns Hopkins University