A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful - Hardcover

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Prologue: Tallinn

My friend Tom was trapped at home in a tiny, distant city. He had no Estonian visa, and he knew if he left Tallinn he'd be unable to return. More immediately problematic was the Russian stripper he'd been flirting with, or, more specifically, her boy friend, who had taken to hanging around Tom's front door. Tom pleaded with me to visit, confident the guy wouldn't take on the two of us.

Tom and I didn't know each other all that well then, nothing like later, but it sounded like a fun excuse for a trip. Unlike Tom, I could leave my apartment in Berlin whenever I wanted - I had a German freelancer's visa and no cuckolded Baltic criminals camped out on my stoop - and was, in fact, spending more time away than at home. By that point Berlin often left me feeling at loose ends, and one of the things I had come to like most about living there was how easy it was never to be in town. A lot of my friends had already moved on, had gone back to resume their real lives in New York, and I myself was beginning to wonder if it wasn't time to pack it in. It was unclear where I'd go, though, mostly because no where was more appealing than Berlin had once been, should have been still. I'd been living in lovely, provincial San Francisco and had moved to Berlin because I'd felt I was missing out on something exciting, and now I was on the brink of leaving lively, provisional Berlin because I was afraid I was missing out on something serious. A quarter lifetime of anecdotal evidence suggested, however, that once I actually motivated myself to move somewhere I considered serious, somewhere like New York - where I had never actually lived for very long but where, I imagined, I would find myself ready to get on with the routines and attachments that make for a real life (cat, yoga, a relationship) - I would once again regret missing all the novelty diverting people elsewhere. Maybe not New York, then. Maybe Kiev. I'd heard Kiev was cheap and cool. I often reminded myself to look into it.

Tom and I held in common the hope that there might be a geo graphic ticket out of the problems of indecision, boredom, and the sus picion that more interesting things were happening in more fashionable places to more attractive people. Actually, that last part was my worry; in Tom's version, less interesting things were happening in contemplative places to more industrious people. Tom had moved to Tallinn with the idea he'd be pressed into productivity there, that the constraint of its distance and exoticism would force him to focus on the work he'd been neglecting in favor of video games and the more dissipated varieties of recreation. I'd moved to Berlin precisely for its lack of constraint, hoping that its sense of vast possibility would help me figure out what I wanted. Needless to say, for reasons that went beyond Russian strippers, it wasn't really working out for either of us. Tom's claustrophobia left him desperate for distraction, and my distraction left me desperate for discipline. We were like two ships waiting for a breeze that might float us past each other in the night.

Tom picked me up at the tiny airport in a taxi and brought me up to date. "I was living in Saigon," he said, "and after a year I had to leave be cause my life was spinning out of control. Then I was living in Rome, and I had to leave after six months because my life was spinning out of con trol. Then I moved to Las Vegas, and I had to leave there, too, very quickly, because my life was definitely once again spinning out of control."

"You were having trouble keeping yourself together in Rome, so you moved to Vegas?"

"So I left Vegas and I thought to myself, okay, I need to finish this long-overdue book, so I'll go to a small, distant country with an impos sible language and I'll just sit and write all day until the book is done. I came here."

He looked out the window