Apollon Apollonovich was in a certain sense like Zeus: from his head there emerged gods, goddesses and genii. We have already seen: one such genius (the stranger with the little black moustache), arising as an image, continued as a being there and then in the yellowish expanses of the Neva, claiming it was from them he had emerged: and not the senator’s head; this stranger turned out to have idle thoughts of his own; and his idle thoughts possessed all the same qualities.
They escaped and acquired solidity.
And one such escaping thought of the stranger’s was the thought that he, the stranger, existed in fact; this thought ran back from the Nevskii into the senator’s brain and there established the idea that the very existence of the stranger in that head was an illusory existence.
And so the circle was closed.
from Petersburg, Andrei Bely, trans. by John Elsworth, Pushkin Press, 2009
There’s snow on the ground outside our house in London and it’s so quiet that the smallest noises catch my attention. Everyone else is sleeping early on this Saturday morning. Not me. Having just returned from a whirlwind trip to Hong Kong and Singapore, my internal clock is still eight hours ahead. Sadly, I was sans famille for this trip; there was too much work planned to be able to take J and M along. A lack of company can make the days a bit longer, but also has its own charms. I grew up in rural northern California and only once travelled outside the United States during my childhood, so the ability to wander solitary around unexplored bits of some of the world’s great cities is a privilege I fully appreciate.
Commuting on the Mid-levels Travelator, Hong Kong
Hong Kong is truly wondrous in this respect. It is in many ways a modern titan of commerce, with gleaming office towers lining the streets of Central, the main business district. It is also a city of extreme verticality. Built on an island peninsula facing Kowloon, the city slopes quickly up on the rise of Victoria Peak behind it. Streets running north south are steep indeed, and peppered liberally with steps set into the concrete to ease the climb. The city’s mid-level travelator is uniquely Hong Kong–a famed system of escalators and moving walkways (the longest such concatenation in the world) it transports people to work down from the “mid-levels” to Central. If you’re in the area, you can see people standing on an escalator reading a newspaper as it whisks them along on their daily commute. [click to continue…]
