I looked around Dovid’s apartment. This party was certainly more interesting than anything I’d experienced in the past year at home. Surrounded by writers, professors, students, and journalists from around the world, and by a collection of books in four or five different languages overflowing the shelves in every room, I felt at ease in a strange way. And I wasn't even drinking vodka.
"What made you decide to move to Vilnius from Canada?" I'd asked.
"Boredom."
Such a simple yet complex answer.
"One day in Vilnius is more interesting than a year in Toronto."
There is nothing more toxic to me than boredom. A day in Vilnius is definitely more interesting than a year in my current hometown, Longmont, Colorado. Is it just the voluntary dislocation, moving myself into an unfamiliar place to jar the senses? I don't think so. Some places seem to be inherently more interesting than others. It's not necessarily the terrain, the weather, or the architecture, although these things certainly play a part. It's the people, the culture, and the intellectual milieu. Cumbria, England, for example, is beautiful, foreign, and boring.
Officially, I'm not an intellectual. I dropped out of high school, worked in blue collar jobs, and never got a degree (although I did get a high school diploma and started college several times). Unofficially, however, I find myself feeling at home in an environment where people are more comfortable discussing literature and world politics than football and celebrity news. I am, perhaps, a misfit, not belonging fully in either world.
Being a misfit, a creature hovering between two worlds, suits me. The description fits in many ways: I am a high school dropout who loves academia and intellectualism. I am an ex-Christian atheist who feels a strong attachment to my Jewish roots. I am an American who longs to live in Europe. The inability to belong to any one group is, perhaps, genetic. I am half Lithuanian and half Russian/Jewish, something that does not seem very odd to my American friends, but a combination that makes many Lithuanians take a step back in shock. The alienation can be frustrating at times, but I find that it is offset by a unique ability to forge bridges between two disparate groups. I can, in general, understand complex issues from multiple viewpoints, and often I can successfully translate between people who cannot seem to understand each other, even if they speak the same language.
A day in Jerusalem, I think, would also be more interesting than a year in Toronto. In that city, according to poet Peter Cole, you are "surrounded by people with whom you disagree, but whom you like very much." How refreshing.
That's how Lithuania has seemed to me, as an outsider anyway. I think America used to be that way, but in the past decade the public dialog has disintegrated into a giant food fight, with the prospect of real violence seeming less ridiculous than the prospect of real conversation. I wonder, though, how close to the surface the violence is in these other places where it has, perhaps obviously, erupted more often than it has in the US.
The saying "may you live in interesting times," is meant to be a curse. And perhaps it is. But it seems that some of us are not fit to live in a perpetual state of blessedness.
I was saving this for an essay, but after I read this short interview on Publisher's Weekly, I decided I'd go ahead and post my own thoughts. Katherine Russell Rich, author of Dreaming in Hindi, understands this. When asked why she returned to India even though her first experiences there were somewhat negative, and sometimes even violent, she answered:
I love the country. I feel I became this other person that now has no other expression. That part of me can't be made to exist here [in the U.S.] because there's nobody who understands the way I was altered by everything there. There is a Chinese curse: may you have an interesting life. And there in India I certainly did.
Sounds like Euro Donna, dreaming in Lithuanian, to me.
Update: I am enjoying Dreaming in Hindi immensely. I spent the last few summers in Lithuania studying the language, amongst other things, and I find that this book pulls me back into the feeling of being in that place where everything is strange and you can't quite understand what's going on. Katherine Russell Rich has captured the essence of the language-learning experience perfectly. I also love the way she has interspersed the science and linguistics information with the parts of her story. It all flows beautifully and makes the book much richer than it would have been as a simple memoir or a simple non-fiction book. I look forward to going back and studying more in the future with the ideas in this book to enrich my own experiences.
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