Futile resolutions, Americans vanishing into the Russian wilderness, and why sex on trains beats any other kind

Procrastination: “one of the general weaknesses that prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind. I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.”   (Samuel Johnson)

Happy New Year. I was just reading that in France, etiquette dictates that one can/should always wish others a happy new year right up until the end of January. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea, or merely something that encourages procrastination. I’ve been back in Kyiv two weeks now, but have been oh-so-slow to recover from the crepuscular funk that’s enveloped me to start 2011. I’m notoriously bad with jet-lag, and this time it’s taken me ages to get back into something resembling a normal routine. Of course, staying up until 7am watching American football can’t exactly help matters.

I’ve never been one to buy into the whole ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ schtick, but I do tend to make general resolutions from time to time. For a while I made my resolutions at the start of September – I couldn’t quite shake the academic mindset, plus when I started teaching I always got jobs that started right at the end of August. September was always the start of something new and thus called for a resolution or two.

Generally I’ve had the same resolutions ongoing for a number of years. They’re probably no different from the vast majority of humanity. Never mind all the exercising more, eating healthier, having more upstanding morals, cutting down on the sarcasm (etc) bullshit, I aim squarely for a more philosophical outlook. Namely:

1. less procrastination
2. less indecision
3. less metaphysics
4. more simplicity

(for a few years I persisted with ‘read less’, which is the opposite of what many people might aspire to, but I kept wanting to get away from having books rule my life – more doing, less thinking, or something like that. Now I say sod it, I like reading and won’t make any apologies about it.)

(but then again…when I asked my pal Murad how I could aspire to be as cool as him, his response: ‘read less and be less self-deprecating in public’. Noted.)

The odds aren’t good thus far. All four resolutions go hand in hand and are hard to disentangle. I think combating such weaknesses would mean a radical overhaul in lifestyle. If there’s a solution, it would have to be drastic. I’ll venture a guess or two as to how this might be accomplished in a moment.

I love travelling - and I mean here the actual process – when it’s by train or proper plane (no budget carriers). I love the rituals, the anticipation and perhaps more than anything else, I love stocking up on reading material at the airport. Most people would agree that the printed matter is far superior to reading on a computer (as far as strain on the eyes and comfort goes) and I especially cherish picking up stacks of periodicals to keep me occupied for days or weeks on end.

But therein lays the problem: when leaving America a fortnight ago, I picked up around $35 worth of reading material at the airport to keep me happily busy in the cold winter months. Every magazine/journal is chock-full of fascinating articles and each one would keep me occupied for at least a week (balanced between other forms of reading, of course – books, stuff online, porn, etc). I could shut myself off from the world and read nothing else but this $35 worth of crap, there are that many interesting articles.

So what’s the problem?

Only one of these magazines is a monthly issue. The rest are weekly. One lousy week’s worth of printed matter can take up a month’s worth of reading!

I’m over-ambitious, and absolutely terrified of missing out on things. There’s just too much out there to take in and the panoply of choice is mortifyingly overwhelming. How is one to decide when we’re surrounded by so many options?

The Economist touched on this in their holiday issue (‘The Tyranny of Choice’):

‘Indeed, the expectation of indecision can prompt panic and a failure to choose at all. Too many options means too much effort to make a sensible decision: better to bury your head under a pillow, or have somebody else pick for you…[a]s the French saying has it: ‘Trop de choix tue le choix’ (too much choice kills the choice).’

It all boils down to this (for many people, not just me, let’s not be too self-indulgent now): there’s a lot of choice out there – what to read, what to do, what to see, where to visit, what to eat. We’re afraid of missing out, so we panic. We aim to simplify, but it’s hard to make a decision as to what to cut out, so we over-complicate matters. As a result, we procrastinate and end up doing nothing at all. And then fret about it, and analyse it to death from a hundred different abstruse angles. Ladies and gentlemen, your four resolutions all wrapped up in one!

These themes have been discussed to death over the years and I’m not qualified enough to add anything much more constructive to the discussion, so I’ll leave it with this, from a terrific article on the subject from the New Yorker:

‘The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing...Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.’

Right now, the first solution that pops into my mind as far as expiating myself of these sins? Move to Sri Lanka and become a Buddhist. Isn’t that the most clear-cut, logical choice?

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While at home over the holidays, I set myself an overly ambitious list of things I wanted to do. In the end, predictably enough, I managed to do very little. When you’ve got a baker’s dozen worth of cats in your household, that’s more than enough to keep you busy.

I ended up reading only 1 book in its entirety, and I thought I’d share it in light of the release of ‘The Way Back’ (review here) – based on Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk - which as far as I know has to be one of the very few films ever made about the Siberian gulags. And though there hasn’t nearly as much in the literary canon about Stalin and The Great Terror as there has about Hitler and the Holocaust, it still something that I hope most people are fairly familiar with.

(Among the books on the subject I’ve read are Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow, primarily concerned with the Holodymor, Stalin’s orchestrated collectivization programme resulting in massive famine and the death of millions in Ukraine in the 1930s; Vasily Grossman’s novel Everything Flows; bits of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago; and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag; getting a lot of hype is the recently released Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder, review here.)

I opted for a different approach with The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia by Tim Tzouliadis, which my old man bought for me last Christmas. As much as I thought I knew about the fate of the disappeared in the 1930s, 40s and 50s Soviet Union, this book uncovered an entirely new chapter, one that I have to confess that I had never heard about: the thousands of Americans who were among Stalin’s victims.

At the risk of over-simplification, it bears repeating that the Great Terror resulted in millions disappearing at Stalin’s behest, millions starved across the Soviet Union and millions deported to gulags all over Siberia, in some of the harshest, most brutal climactic conditions known to mankind. Few survived.

The book describes how in the wake of the Great Depression, many Americans fled to the sanctuary of the Soviet Union and its dream of equality for all citizens. Some were captivated by the ideological manifestations and the grand social experiment that the Soviet Union encapsulated, others were simply looking for work. In helping Stalin achieve fulfilment of his Five-Year Plan, in 1931 Henry Ford set up a factory in Nizhni Novgorod, which was soon christened ‘the Russian Fordsville’ or ‘Nizhni New York’.

Naturally the Americans brought some of their own customs over, the most notable being baseball. Teams were quickly organised, leagues and tournaments were established, games were played in Gorky Park and large crowds flocked to watch. Soon the Russians began to play and if you can resist the author’s overly exuberant claims, you’d believe that baseball came ever-so-close to taking the Soviet Union by storm. Suffice to say it soon became massively popular.

A brief foray into my distant baseballing past

The idea of Americans teaching the Russians how to play baseball struck a personal chord with me. In the summer of 1992, while I was living in Germany, my baseball team went to a small town called Vrchlabi in what was then Czechoslovakia to participate in an international baseball tournament, with teams from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy and Greece. Ostensibly we were there to teach these kids how to play baseball properly, but in the end we spent more time drinking the potent beer and chasing cute Czech girls than actually playing baseball. And when we did play, we actually embarrassed ourselves on a number of occasions, losing to the Poles and Czechs. In fact, I’m not even sure whether we won more than 1 game. All I can remember about the actual baseball we played was that we lost 1-0 to a Polish team who played with an 18 year old pitcher (maximum age was supposed to be 15) and I played with my left arm in plaster after suffering torn wrist ligaments a few weeks prior to the trip.

For those uninitiated to the world of baseball, pitching with one arm is might tricky, and please bear with me on this part. It involved putting the palm of the glove on my left hand (I’m right-handed, which would normally mean wearing the glove on my left hand, thus throwing with my right) and then going into a normal wind-up. After releasing the ball, the natural pitcher’s wind-up would see me slip the glove onto my right-hand (as a left-hander would normally wear it). Logistically, this was very tricky and took lots of practice. It might have been easier just to throw the ball as I normally would and not worry about putting the glove back onto my throwing hand after every pitch. But I had to be able to catch the ball that was thrown back to me from the catcher, and more importantly, I had to transfer the glove to my right hand as quickly as possible in order to be ready for any hard-hit balls right at me. In the end, only one ball was hit at me and I absolutely screwed it up. Once you catch the ball in the mitt, the hardest part is then getting it out with one hand. You have to delicately and quickly drop it into and cradle it into your left elbow (the one with the plaster), shake the glove off your right hand, grab the ball and then throw it over to first base. I ended up launching it thirty feet over the first baseman’s head.

It just so happened that I got my chance to pitch against the only other American team playing in this tournament, and needless to say, they were all impressed, commending me on my effort, saying that they’d never forget my performance. (I’m sure that to this very day, players from that team still post messages on each other’s Facebook wall, with comments like ‘dude, you remember that kid who pitched against us with one arm? man that kid was unbelievable!’). I don’t remember the exact score, but we lost by just one run – something like 9-8 I believe, which for Little League baseball is pretty good – trust me, here.

Anyway, I was far from a pioneer in this respect. I got my inspiration from the legendary Jim Abbott, who was born with only one hand and by necessity had to pitch like this for his entire career, quite a successful one. Here’s a look at how he did it. And yes, everyone called me Jim Abbott from that point on.

Now back to the book

I don’t intend to get into too many details and specifics here. Though the story itself is a riveting one, it’s not the most well-written book and there were lots of things that bugged me. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. There’s a bit of what I’m going to start calling the Freakanomics principle at work here. Freakanomics presents some truly fascinating ideas. The problem is, those ideas could be whittled down to a series of short essays resulting in a book 1/10 the size that it actually is. I found most of it padded with fluff after the initial, revelatory conclusions. The same goes for The Forsaken. Much of it veers off-topic and for long stretches the American element is neglected or barely mentioned. Once I got the initial idea, I could have skipped large swathes of the middle portion and instead jumped to the end, without missing too much. It relies heavily on the testimony of one particular story, so I kept wondering whether I might not have been better off just reading that character’s autobiography.

It’s also poorly edited with sloppy mistakes; italics are used way too excessively; there are no maps despite the plethora of place names, making it hard to make heads or tails of it at times and I had to keep consulting maps, which is inexcusable for a book like this. And though this isn’t a criticism but an observation, FDR and the Democratic Party as a whole are made to look like raging communists. I quickly realised why my father got it for me – in fact, I think what inspired him to buy it was a review in Newsmax, which is as right-wing a magazine as they come.

I don’t want to be too unfair because it was still a very enjoyable, engaging, gripping read, filled with lots of insight and truly eye-opening tales, of Americans being rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to the gulags, of the futility of trying to get out of the Soviet Union, almost impossible since so many had their passports confiscated and US citizenships rescinded upon arrival. And the tales of their loved ones back in America trying desperately to get some word of their well-being and location, only for most of their pleas to fall on deaf ears were heart-breaking. Joseph Davies, the American ambassador at the time, comes off particularly bad, his negligence and insouciance condemning many of his fellow citizens to their sorry fates. Letters were sent in vain to the State Department, with distraught family members often receiving this chilling reply:

‘Since Mr Cooper no longer has the status of an American citizen, this Department is unable to take any steps which may assist in the obtaining of information with respect to him.’

Powerful stuff.

One other part bears mention. As a huge fan of the classic the Master and Margarita, I was especially intrigued to hear the origins of where Bulgakov got his inspiration for Satan’s Ball from. In the early 1930s, then American ambassador William Bullitt hosted an embassy ball – with Bulgakov and his wife among the invited - themed ‘Arrival of Spring’, with a vast array of mesmerising colours, plants and trees shipped in from warmer climes. Wanting to impress his visitors and display the opulence of America in distant climes, various animals were brought in to entertain. The director of the Moscow Zoo was always eager to loan the embassy animals. Bullitt originally wanted to have the ballroom floor glassed over and filled with tropical fish, but for whatever reason this didn’t work out. Among the animals on display, bear cubs, kid goats and cockerels featured most prominently. An aviary was created for the greenfinches on loan. All sorts of shenanigans unfolded – people dancing with the bear cub, the bear cub shitting on people, drunken Cossack dancing, champagne poured down the bear cub’s mouth. The birds flew into the golden nets in a panic when the jazz band struck up the Star Spangled Banner. Also, the character of Baron Meigel in the book, ‘employee of the Spectacles Commission in charge of acquainting foreigners with places of interest in the capital’ was modeled on Baron Boris Steiger, the liaison officer between the diplomatic community and the NKVD (Commissariat for Internal Affairs).

The ball continued all through the night, with the last guests leaving at 9am, long after the gold-painted cockerels began to crow. The jazz band kept playing, and the guests were too afraid to leave seeing as this might be the last chance for something like this. At this time, things were still going well for the Americans enjoying life in the Soviet Union, but less than a year after the ball, the terror began, and Americans began disappearing in droves. Many remained in camps well into the 1950s, with some being arrested, released, and re-arrested for a second or third time.  

Nothing like a bit of cheery holiday reading then.

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Back to my summer of 2010 travel recap – sort of

Travelling by train just isn’t the thing to do in America. The glory days of the railroad era are long behind us, and these days rail is primarily used for transport of goods across country, though if there’s any part of the country where trains are still popular it would be in the northeast, with the Boston-NY-Philadelphia-DC route widely-used. I once phoned up Amtrak in Texas to enquire about a train from San Antonio to Austin and was laughed off the phone. I ended up having to rent a car – there was only one bus a day and it took three times longer than by car.

With its vast distances, America is better suited for getting around by plane, when time is an issue of course. When it isn’t, there are few things more literary than the great American road trip, and I’ve had my share of fun road trips: one across country from Washington to Florida and two in the deep South.

But for the quintessential American experience, it’s hard to beat an epic, day-long Greyhound journey. During my first year at Tufts, I spent my spring break travelling on a 28-hour journey from Boston to Jacksonville, Florida to visit my aunt and uncle. It was an unbelievable journey – in a bad way. I’m not sure what possessed me to put myself through such an ordeal (it must’ve been much cheaper than flying) for the novelty wore off after the first couple of hours. The prospect of another 28 hours for the return leg filled me with dread for the entire week. My aunt offered to buy me a plane ticket, but I stubbornly refused and endured the bus ride back. 

The beginning of my trip back to Kyiv a fortnight ago started with 6+ hours of coach travel getting from New Hampshire to JFK airport. En route, I was left to reflect on just why I love train travel, and how it trumps all other forms of transport. I could have taken the train, but at $100 versus the $15 I paid for the coach, with both forms taking the same amount of time, it was an easy choice. Trains are more fun anyway in other parts of the world, places where it’s one of the few options for getting around. For my money, few things beat an overnight, 3^rd class train journey in Eastern Europe, though it’s a lot less rambunctious and more sanitised these days than it used to be.

So why is train travel so superior to all other forms? For a multitude of reasons:

• It’s far more social. Like many people, I’m very anti-social when I go by plane or bus, preferring to keep my head tucked into a book. Trains are more convivial places, and it helps when you share compartments with strangers and can look them in the eye, or get a better look at the book they’re reading. Books are such great conversation starters, after all. I’ve not only had some of the most interesting chats with other travellers during the daylight hours, but I’ve shared many a bottle of potent, homemade liquor with inebriated locals on overnight journeys.

• It’s a rare treat to be able to take the uninitiated on an overnight 3^rd class journey. When my sister and I took a freezing overnight from Lviv to Kyiv in January 2006, the poor girl had a rough time of things. While I was fast asleep, she had to use the toilet. She endured a torrid time with the drunk, bantering locals who tried to ply her vodka and fags as she stumbled bleary-eyed through the smoky mist. The idiot also failed to put her shoes on, coming back with sopping wet socks which naturally had to be sacrificed. I found it all very funny at the time.

• There’s a certain, indescribable haziness to overnight border crossings, as you’re shouted at and harassed by border guards, having to repeatedly show your passport while you lie in a half-sleep/half-stupor wondering whether all the indecipherable, blaring announcements emanating from the station loud-speakers in the dead of night might be veiled instructions to round up all foreigners and haul them off to different trains en route to the far east and…the gulags.

• Though you inevitably end up meeting fellow travellers, the real highlight is meeting quirky locals, especially little old ladies. On a train in the Czech Republic years ago, a smelly old pensioner plopped herself down next to me and started peeling potatoes. She saw that I was reading a book on Scottish nationalism (this was just before I was to start my Master’s at Edinburgh). This provided the catalyst for a wonderful conversation about Czech history, with her regaling me with stories from her Prague childhood, with recollections of the second world war, the Soviet tanks rolling in afterwards, anecdotes about Dubcek and much else besides. Despite her extremely limited English and my non-existent Czech, we somehow understood each other. It reminds me now of Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad, where he meets a beautiful young Ukrainian woman in Odesa or Crimea and has a 12 hour conversation with her, despite neither of them knowing a word of each other’s language. Somehow, they made themselves perfectly understood.

• Trains are more literary places. There’s a reason why so many epic scenes in books are set in trains and not buses or planes. And yes, I do realise that trains have been around longer than the other two, but it still seems like some of the most memorable scenes have been featured on trains or at train stations. Amongst so many others, the ones that jump out are the Sheltering Sky, the Unbearable Lightness of Being, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, A Suitable Boy, various Graham Greene novels, and of course, Anna Karenina. I know I’m probably missing many others.

• Trains are for real readers – and yes, this will sound snobbish. People read proper books on trains, whereas your typical aeroplane fare consists of trashy magazines and even trashier airport fiction. Sorry.

• I’d like to say that the Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux is another train classic, but amazingly I’ve yet to read it.

• Another glaring omission from my experience: India. That has to be done soon.

• I’d say even the quality of conversations is far superior on trains. Being able to look across at someone and make eye contact makes a world of difference, and the conversations I’ve had and overheard on trains have had much more literary merit than anything elsewhere. I think buses are more suitable for flirting teens, idle chit-chat, aimless thinking and listening to music. Which are all fine and dandy.

• Train station cafes are far superior to those at bus stations. That’s an easy one and isn’t really debatable. Italy, land of great coffee, perhaps the best in the world, and yet the finest coffee I had during my time there was at the Padova train station. And it was in a plastic cup. And that’s not a negative indictment of the quality of Italian coffee.

• Trains take you through desolate villages, picturesque valleys, past meandering streams, sprawling farmland, allowing glimpses of time stood still: farmers with their horses and ploughs, peasants at work in the fields, old and crumbling houses falling to pieces, people sitting by the wayside watching life go by.

• Trains make the journey more a part of the travelling experience. Planes and buses are merely ways to get from A to B. ‘Travel for the movement only, not the conclusion; that way you’ll be a part of the journey and not a victim of it’. (Owen Sheers)

• Though I enjoy travelling on trains everywhere, the further east you go, the more fun the journey. Trains in Germany are too sanitary, though they are incredibly efficient. Spanish trains are nothing special. Britain doesn’t really count. Italy, if you consider it ‘western’, is an exception. I love the trains there. They’re sufficiently grimy and dilapidated, a key trait for fun times.   

• There’s a certain timelessness to train travel. When you’re not in a hurry, it’s easily the best way to go, not to mention it’s more environmentally-friendly. Oftentimes the slow granny trains that make a million stops are more interesting than the rapid ones that fly right by all the tiny villages and skip out on all the little, backwoods stations. I remember the time I enquired about a train in Nigeria to take me from Port Harcourt up to Jos in the north. I felt like it would be a sufficiently ‘colonial’ experience – there I go with my orientalist tendencies again. The train station was derelict, all the offices were closed, yet there were a handful of people milling about, doing nothing. I asked one guy if he knew anything about trains up north. He too was waiting for a train in the same direction. How long had he been waiting? 10 hours. How long until the next train was due to depart? He had no idea, there were no published timetables. 'Whenever the train comes,' he replied. What was the longest amount of time he’d ever waited? Three days. And how long did the journey take? Nearly two days. In comparison, a shared taxi or overly-packed minibus took about 9-10 hours. Despite the lack of comfort in that option, I went with the minibus, an awful experience I hope never to repeat. I lost feeling in my legs for days.

• And lastly, and terribly vaguely here, epic, memorable and nostalgic things just ‘happen’ on trains. There are stories I just can’t share. Yet I’ve got some images that will remain indelibly etched in my memory for as long as I’m alive, from illicit encounters that can only happen on trains, to unbelievable exchanges with the most ridiculous of characters to things I’ve learnt about myself as a person. Trains bring out the best in the traveller, and there’s no other way of putting it.

What’s this all got to do with last summer’s jaunt round Eastern Europe? Not much, other than that I took lots of train journeys and enjoyed them all thoroughly.   

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What Darnell has read/is reading in January 2011: The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh; The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz; The White Guard, Bulgakov; Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, John McWhorter; and $35 worth of crap picked up from the airport