It was a really lovely spring yesteraft and -eve in Moscow...the government typically making it one of three working Saturdays so as to constitute a coming disorder of May holidays... The women were, as usual, seasonally dressed to attract and distract; the men, also, indifferently. The crowded Arbat...where Russians and tourists stroll looking for little more than passing time, or a partner. The Alexander Garden, near the historic and powerful Kremlin, with its predictable thousands of the unhistoric and powerless lounging on the greens, walking by with their uncertain faces...
Thousands I watched walk by. Happily, I was little observed observing. Someone should write a psychic guide to Moscow. (And not only for Moscow, but it could not be "politically correct".)
Thousands. How, why, can so many be so boring and predictable? The most interesting and entertaining person was a quiet, polite quite drunk man, as he tried, without falling, to get over a mere string surrounding a memorial area to which he had gone -- uselessly -- to try to read a plaque. Charley Chaplin could have done it. (He finally went under. A TV quality performance.)
Goethe in his last decade, if I recall correctly, was asked if he would like to go again to Rome or to Paris. He said he would rather go where there are not only larvae and pupae.
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