Video Diary

It was 2007, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done anything that felt exciting or youthful or new. I bought a ticket to visit an old friend who’d been living in Berlin for six years, paying a hundred euros a month to live in an unrenovated prewar apartment. Delia had a wide balcony and no discernible line of work. It was midsummer, when Berlin endures only three or four hours of actual darkness, and the air is soft and heavy with desire, clear with vast possibility. In the early evenings we lolled around, drinking cheap beer on the overgrown grass fringe of the canal in the stalled sunset radiance, thick with the scent of untamed green, and later we went out, each night until long past dawn, biking all over the city with a rotating cast of international dubiety—paint-spattered people with unidentifiable accents—dancing at Rio, at WMF, at Bar25, at Club der Visionäre, at Weekend, the last of which had just been written up in the most detailed Berlin-is-the-place-of-the-now sally the New York Times had yet produced. I cannot account for what we did during the day, if we did anything at all. Everyone I encountered in Berlin seemed to have the freedom—economically and culturally—to do exactly what he or she pleased. What was important was what was happening right now. Nobody seemed to hold anybody to account. It wasn’t like San Francisco or New York, where the first question anybody asked at a party was what you did for a living, and the second was where you lived and how much you paid to live there. The other reason was that, perhaps because of that freedom, Berlin felt like the center of something surprising and important, and I couldn’t help thinking it would be a good place for an aspiring writer. The rumors of a new Lost Generation were a terrible cliché, but it was hard to resist them. I applied for a Fulbright, figuring I could do with at least the imprimatur of institutional legitimacy. My proposal—some essay I planned never to write about contemporary young German novelists, about whom I knew exactly nothing—was the sort of thing I’d been advised the committee wanted to hear, and I got it. Twenty-seven was an unusual age to move to Berlin, but I’d always had a precocious sense of crisis, and my decision to go was spurred at least in part by my fantasy that I might be able to stave off future regret. I felt like I owed the experience to some subsequent self. Everybody else in Berlin was either twenty-two, just out of leafy liberal arts colleges and in flight from the responsibilities ahead, or they were thirty-nine, just out of a career or a relationship and in flight from the responsibilities behind. For my part, I moved there as a kind of preemptive strike, reasoning that if I bolted while I could, in my late twenties, I wouldn’t bolt when I couldn’t, in my forties, or maybe more specifically at approximately forty-six, when my dad left his marriage and moved in with Brett, a lovely guy he met at the gym, and my brother and I could never get in touch with him about car insurance or baseball games because the two of them were always disappearing to the nightclubs of Key West or Palm Springs. They e-mailed self-portraits in sailor suits from themed Atlantis cruises down Baja. My dad’s justification for this, in those moments when he felt as though he needed to produce one, was that he was claiming the outré adolescence he’d been denied. He’d lived a life long on sacrifice and short on pleasure, and had begun, at last, to live the life he deserved. “Deserved” was his word. More than anything, his two mistakes—first, not living the life he wanted; and, second, believing this had been a sacrifice that freed him from all future sacrifices, like having dinner with his children when he wanted to stay longer at the bar, or treating their mother with any respect—were what I hoped to avoid. I explained my fear of regret in terms of how unusually clearly my dad’s life—in which a bad, perhaps even cowardly decision made in his twenties became a thirties of anxiety, a forties of resentment, and a fifties of abandon—exemplified the great cost of not having acted as one wished when one still had time. I thought that perhaps my dad’s problem was that he hadn’t had enough experience, that he’d chosen a career and a marriage before he knew what else was out there, and I didn’t want to make the same error. Experiencewise, I wanted what I thought everybody wanted: to go to secret parties with artist/DJs that people in Brooklyn hadn’t even heard of, or to sleep with as many people as, say, Tom, so that when I got back into a committed relationship it wouldn’t be for the mere sake of being in one but because I’d chosen that person. Those were the reasons I gave for moving to Berlin. Or at least, those were the excuses I gave for moving to Berlin. I arrived in time for a few days of lingering late summer. I took the U-Bahn from the airport, dropped my stuff at a sublet, spent my first euros on a pack of cigarettes, and walked slowly down the Karl-Marx-Allee toward Delia’s apartment feeling alone and free and already different. My first night in town was Delia’s send-off, which seemed cruelly unfortunate at the time. (Later I understood it was a common enough coincidence: every day somebody arrived and somebody else left.) I arrived at her apartment to find the German national women’s Ultimate Frisbee team running around in their underwear in the living room while the men smoked on the balcony, trying to decide where we’d all go later, if the women decided to put their pants back on. In Berlin it thus seemed, from that first night’s demented relaxation into morning, as though everything was up in the air at all hours; no possibility was foreclosed. The local custom was to commit to as little as possible, and by “local custom” I do not mean “German custom.” If the twentieth century had taught anybody anything at all, it was that Germans had lousy customs. Hence Berlin’s appeal: there was no cultural arbitration. My colleagues in Paris had the futile errand of trying to resemble the French. Those in Beijing competed in the absurd contest of trying to understand China. In Tokyo, or in London, or in Moscow, your sunlit hours had to have some nontrivial relationship to the economy. Berlin was an experiment in total freedom from authority, an infinitely long weekend with your parents out of town. It felt like an anti-gravity chamber. The old crimes licensed you to ignore the claims of the past; the low cost of living licensed you to ignore the demands of the present; and the future was something that would happen when we moved back to New York, where many of us would once more live in uncomfortable proximity to our actual parents, and where people talked about real estate and restaurants. It was not that I did not like talking about restaurants. It’s normal to like talking about restaurants. But in Berlin when we talked about restaurants, it was the cheap kebab places; this was part of the ritual by which we acknowledged the aspects of our Berlin existence that differentiated us from our friends at home. We, and now I mean the people I came to love in Berlin, David Levine and Alix and Emilie, often felt like survivors whose home planet had become glutted with condos bought by people who waited in line for cupcakes, and we congratulated ourselves and one another on having gotten out just in time. This gave our decision to do as little of consequence as possible—with this ocean of space and profligacy of hours—the legitimate pretext of cultural and economic protest. We rebelled against the authority of rent and cupcakes. In theory, this chartered us to do whatever we pleased whenever we wanted. In practice, it meant we spent a lot of time wondering what we wanted to do, and if we wanted to do anything at all. Or maybe that was just me. Part of my anti-regret crusade involved making sure I was always doing just what I felt like, which mostly meant keeping myself open for things that might come up, saying yes to whatever distraction happened along. It was an extremely active kind of passivity and it went swimmingly at night, when things were always coming up: there were gallery openings and bars and clubs, all elbowy with asymmetrical people proving provocative until breakfast. The daytimes were another matter; then it was less clear what the most vital and necessary and memorable experience available might be. I went to Berlin with a whole shelf of unread books, books like Middlemarch, but every time I sat down hungover in a café at eleven a.m. with that copy of Middlemarch, the whole day open before me, I inevitably thought to myself, Why move to Berlin to read Middlemarch? I could read Middlemarch in San Francisco (though, naturally, I hadn’t). The whole point of living in Berlin was being an agent in the world of total possibility. Was reading Middlemarch the thing I most desired to do in that particular hour? It wasn’t easy to say. Ordinarily I had to put the book down and go on a walk to think it over, to make sure I was maximizing the value of my experience. These often turned into some pretty long walks. When I got back to the neighborhood from my walks, I sat around the Turkish bakery with Alix, or I went with her to check out the newer galleries up in Wedding. When I was with Alix, I felt as though there was nothing else in the world I’d rather be doing. When she was busy I went to see Wings of Desire. Part of the point of Wim Wenders’s 1987 film, which I must’ve seen a dozen times in that first year, is that Berlin before the fall of the Wall had long been an inertial place, a sort of vacuum. There was no industry in the West; factory owners were afraid the Soviets would blockade the city, as they had shortly after the war. The banks were in grimy Frankfurt, technology and automobiles were in bourgeois Munich and arrogant Stuttgart, the press was in wealthy Hamburg, the provisional government in boring Bonn. West Berlin was merely a symbol of resistance, a great series of photo ops, and America was happy to help pay for it as long as it continued to provide such good press. East Berlin was just as unreal. It was a Communist set, the utopian socialism of the future, but it was also a big, expensive mock-up. The rest of the country was bankrupted by the purchase of ornamental tile for the wedding-cake palazzi that lined the Stalinallee (now the Karl-Marx-Allee I walked to Delia’s frisbee-underwear going-away). The Fernsehturm, or TV Tower, at Alexanderplatz, the city’s only height of note, had been built in 1969 as a present to the Volk from their twenty-year-old puppet government. They’d had to use Western technology and Swedish engineers, and the people were already picking up TV signals from the free side of the city. After the Wall went up, in 1961, there was never anything of true geopolitical importance at stake. Its construction wasn’t an escalation but a diffusion: it made the conflict not political but rhetorical, for the benefit of the media. The movie follows two angels as they bum around the city. One of them becomes smitten with a doleful French trapeze artist, and his feelings for her convince him to leap from eternity into time. Peter Falk, playing himself as a former angel, encourages Damiel’s transition. In the scene where he first wakes up as a mortal, he asks a passerby for help. The man teaches him the words for the colors in the graffiti on the Wall—his life until then had been in black and white—and then gives him change for his first hot coffee and pack of cigarettes. He gulps the black coffee, his eyes wide. This had always evoked what felt like a disproportionate response in me; it wasn’t the sort of movie that was supposed to make you cry. On some level it was probably just because I was lonely and indecisive, sitting yet again by myself on a Tuesday at one in the afternoon at the Kino Babylon or at the Moviemento, and because it ends with the inevitability of an enduring romance, which already seemed impossibly remote in libertine Berlin. But it wasn’t just that. The citizens of divided Berlin were marooned on an island outside of time. Their ability to do what they wanted to do was thwarted by their historical circumstance. But once they, like the angel, were able to pass through the Wall, they would leave behind their suspended existence and enter the swift current of life. When the angel wakes up as a mortal, he strides away from the Wall with the assurance and the joy of the convalescent. He’s so giddy to have time—to have finite time, time that now counts for precisely something because its quantity is fixed—that he knows just how he’s going to use it. I’d been so entranced by this image that I’d missed the crucial prelude, the process by which his desires crystallize and he understands why he wants to be free: to share a fleeting life with his trapeze artist. In moving to Berlin, I was working (or not working, as the case may have been) on the assumption that a grand gesture was itself enough—that, in the wake of the decision to uproot myself, my true desires would emerge to fill the vacuum. In the nineties Wenders made a sequel to the movie that I’d never seen; the last thing I wanted to know was what happened next. But I realize now I should have known what would happen next. One of the very first things I’d heard upon arrival in Berlin was a line from the 1920s feuilletonist Karl Scheffler: Berlin ist dazu verdammt, immerfort zu werden, niemals zu sein. Berlin is damned always to become and never to be. It was such a seductive idea, that the city would never grow fusty or calcific and that, by proxy, you would never become fusty or calcific. And if a place was always becoming, there was no time for belatedness, no great era you’d missed out on, no cost to frittering away your time doing this or that. But we were, I was, so easily seduced, I missed the part about damned. * For a while there, at the beginning, starting with that Frisbee panty party, things were genuinely fizzy and I didn’t at all mind spending my days just walking around and my nights saying yes to whatever happened to present itself. Just being there felt glorious, or, more than glorious, felt like enough. We felt like participants. The cigarettes, those endless stockpiles of cigarettes, and the coffee really did taste different, as they always do in a new place, and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes felt like sufficient acts. Cigarettes marked off the time. For the few minutes one lasted, you knew exactly what you were doing: you were smoking that cigarette. When it was done, you would figure out what to do next, or you would just light another. I arrived in Berlin with ten e-mail addresses. The first person I met, Emilie, looked at my list and said I needn’t bother e-mailing the rest; she knew them all, and I’d see them the next day at the big gallery opening. Her friend Alix was coming along, and I’d love her. We met at Emilie’s place first, in a cobbled and uncharacteristically pretty street behind Arkonaplatz. Alix’s name was pronounced in the French style, ah-LEEX, and she arrived with a duffel bag big enough for a body. “Where did you just come from?” I asked. “A trip? Hockey practice?” “Nowhere,” Alix said. She’s thin and angular and striking, with pointy elbows, long, nervous fingers, and deep-set almond eyes. She has a soft rumpled tide of unruly hair and glows with a cold marmoreal light. She opened the bag and changed in front of us, into a billowy unbelted stained silk dress and Thirty Years’ War–vintage combat boots tourniqueted at the ankles. The economic, cultural, and psychological draws of Berlin—the sheer amounts of time and space that in other cities would be taken up by day jobs or the steady emotional drain of long-standing friendships; the almost religiously shared belief in the possibility of personal reinvention; and an addiction to the promise of the new—made for a robust art scene, at least according to various multilingual periodicals. This opening was at the new outpost of a huge London gallery. The room, or rather the space—nothing took place in something as banal as a room—had the size and character of a well-swept munitions depot, and probably had served as one once. Everything in Berlin happened in a former somewhere: the former sanitation-technology factory in the Ritterstraße, the former pretzel factory in the Prenzlauer Allee, the dome of the former post office in the Oranienburgerstraße that now had a restaurant/club that would only take reservations via text message to a secret number, the former department-store-vault club that was now in the former basement of the former (current?) power station, and of course the former dentist’s office, which the white tiles heated up like a sauna. All of these rooms had been liberated from their erstwhile indebtedness to productivity. In the former munitions depot, people dressed in lab coats angled through the crowd with purpose, and I assumed they were caterers. Once I’d become a little more familiar with art, I’d look back and wonder if they hadn’t been part of the installation, or, once I felt as though I knew even more about art, if they’d possibly been both caterers and part of the installation. After the opening we got into a cab and went to a party in Kreuzberg hosted by a fragile, fey artist in a black feathered boa and his bloodshot gallerist, who was wearing a T-shirt that said “Vulva Vaginal Scent” and chewing on lollipops. I texted a friend in San Francisco, described these guys, and asked if they were anybody I should feel pleased to be at a party with. He wrote: FAMOUS GUY SAATCHI ART CAVE OF DICKS. I tried nonchalantly to ask Emilie what CAVE OF DICKS meant and she said that the guy in the black feathered boa had once made a cave of dicks. Actual live dicks. They hung down from unsuckably distant glory holes in the ceiling. A sometimes-celebrated young conceptual artist who, I was told, was always on the prowl found out I was a writer and asked me to help him craft a text message to a chick photographer on assignment for Vice in Stockholm. He had thick tortoiseshell glasses and whined with refinement. He assumed I was an art critic, as most everyone did when I introduced myself as a writer, and asked me about magazines. “Have you ever written for Domus? No? But you’ve heard of Domus, right? What about Precept? Not that, either? Yeah, it’s weird, me neither, I hadn’t heard of them until recently. There are just all these magazines, and it’s weird, all of them profile me. And you’re, like, what are you, you know? Are you art magazines or fashion magazines or what, when you profile me?” He named more magazines. “Uovo. Texte zur Kunst. 032c, Bidoun, Monopol, mono.kultur. So many. Texte zur Kunst.” Alix swooped in and delivered me onto a roof to smoke, though of course you could smoke inside too. She rolled her eyes and promised that there was more to the art scene here than naming magazines. There were, to be fair, some very fine artists. There was Omer, a gruff Israeli who made multichannel video installations; there was the pretty much just Danish guy who made a big deal about being Icelandic and had a dirigible hangar and eighty pretty assistants; there was Maxime, a French kid in his early twenties who shot the kind of harsh and tender photographs one might have seen on Nan Goldin’s Facebook page; and there was Ignacio, who’d spent ten years in an office job making private artworks out of thousand-cell Excel spreadsheets. However, with the exception of Maxime, who had to stay out late enough for his friends to start tattooing each other so he could take pictures of them to put online, the really good artists didn’t seem to go out that much. “Let’s get out of here,” Alix said, and took me to Bar Drei, where we sat until seven o’clock in the morning. There was no art space in Berlin more interesting than Bar Drei, and it wasn’t an art space at all. It looked like a gallery that had dispensed with the pretext of art entirely in favor of the unimpeachable idea of charging money for the free drinks. It was a fishbowl on a lonely corner behind the Volksbühne and had no sign save a large “3” stenciled on the door. The bar itself was a triangle of black Formica countertop in the center of the room, its vertices rounded off, so sitting at it made you feel as though you were a member of some deliberative post-tribal council of the future. The walls to the street were enormous windows. Everyone went there after the openings, or, as you got smarter about things, you skipped the openings and went straight to Drei, which was like an opening but with chairs. That was all anybody wanted at an opening, anyway, were chairs. The only other furnishings at Drei were black spherical bulbs that hung on cords at even intervals over the bar, like soft interrogation lamps; they weren’t fixed to anything and the only thing that would get you kicked out was pendulating them. Drei hired mostly artists, both Americans and Germans, as bartenders, and part of their art practice—I assumed this had something to do with the art world’s recent infatuation with something called “relational aesthetics”—was never keeping precise tabs. At the end of the night there was always a tense but pleasurable negotiation about the matter of what to pay. Drei, I came to see as I became part of it, had an astonishingly regular clientele. Berlin was a city where three quarters of the population couldn’t drag itself out of bed before noon, but if there was one place that made people reliable, it was Drei. It was safe to assume that on any given evening, between the closing of the openings and the opening of the clubs, most of the people I came to know would be there. Some people I knew I saw only there. I met David Levine at Drei; and Zhivago, a beefy and voluble half-Danish, half-Syrian installation artist who grew up between Sacramento, Paris, and Valletta, and spoke at least eight languages, all of them fluently, none of them natively; and Carson, the gentle czar of the international-art-expat scene, who ran a noncommercial space devoted to intersections of art and architecture, dressed in sheer and tasteful varieties of drapery, and was always off to Osaka or Cap d’Antibes or Istanbul for a biennial or panel; and the other David, who painted surgically enhanced women in oils with textbook anatomical precision and spent three hours each day at the gym and seven hours each night smoking; and the style bloggers; and the Norwegian video artists; and, a little while later, the younger guys with the Internet-based work. In the summer everyone sat around on the monument outside, the one to all the lost and forgotten monuments, and in the winter the smoke was so thick inside that nobody had to smoke at all. * But Bar Drei didn’t open until nine-thirty at night, which still left the matter of the daytime. As far as doing nothing was concerned, if you couldn’t be an artist, you could at least be Jewish; in a way all the Americans in Berlin were honorary Jews. (Many of them were actual Jews.) In the first quarter of the twentieth century the saying used to go that “every Berliner comes from Breslau,” from the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement. They also said that “the Jew comes from the East and has no time.” He was an avatar of restless commercial modernity. These days the Jew comes from the West and has more time than he knows what to do with. He is an avatar of restless noncommercial modernity. I got by in that first year by writing up cranky little dispatches for a Web-based Jewish magazine out of New York that allowed the Jewishness of my content to be glancing. The main trouble, it seemed to me, was that American Jews and Germans felt as though they needed to say something to one another, but never quite knew what. My mom, a rabbi and a psychoanalyst, came to visit for my first Thanksgiving, and we toured the standard Jewish monuments and memorials. Her feeling about the monuments and the memorials, like her feelings about anything in general, was that it was important to keep the conversation going, that the only way toward healing is through talk. I told her that of course I tended to agree with her, but that the problem in Berlin was that the conversational partners just didn’t match up. It often felt as though Germans over a certain age—twenty-five, say—wanted something from you, some sign that everything had finally become okay. I mostly did think that everything had become okay, but I never felt entitled to say that. After all, I hadn’t any personal connection to the Holocaust. The people who could offer real forgiveness were dead, or they were dying. The ubiquity of these conversational templates made it impossible to forget I was Jewish. In the States it was something I’d never thought much about, which had always struck my friends as strange. They assumed that I, as the son of two rabbis, would have a strong religious commitment. But my parents had been savvy enough to know that if they made a big deal out of observance, we’d certainly end up defecting; so—with the exception of weekly Shabbat dinners at home and High Holiday attendance and large annual seders—they left it up to us, which meant we’d ended up mostly like normal, suburban, disaffected cultural Jews. Our Jewishness meant Woody Allen and latkes, like anybody else’s. But in Berlin this ambivalent patrimony was foisted upon you. It was immediately clear that Jews had a certain purchase in Berlin; as David Levine let me quote him in one of my first columns, “They really know how to torque it.” I decided at a certain point that I liked those Jews best who were a little interested in the Holocaust, who liked to talk a few minutes of Holocaust now and then, technical stuff, mostly. These were often academics, like my friend who was writing a dissertation about the few exiles who returned, against their wives’ protests, to help rebuild German universities after the war. But a healthy relationship to the Holocaust wasn’t the norm. Melodrama was easier, more cheaply satisfying, and it was one way to explain to yourself what you were doing in Germany: just existing there was an act of defiance and strength. Being a Jew in New York is a mark of some considerable banality, but being a Jew in Berlin makes you special. You have the Holocaust in your pocket, the run of a city you rightly deserve. There was the feeling that the Holocaust got you off the hook, only furthering the idea that you were in Berlin to do just as you pleased, sleep with whomever you felt like, even if she had a boyfriend. It allowed you to be contemptuous of the Germans, gave you an excuse to ignore the local culture. Or you could be obsequious, make a big deal out of how little you cared about the Holocaust, how much you despised the “Shoah industry,” how awful the histrionics of Libeskind. Jews like this were ambassadors; they found it in themselves to congratulate the Germans for having gotten over the past, which often—counterintuitively—meant congratulating themselves for having overcome their own fraught Jewish-American identity. It was a gesture of forgiveness that had everything to do with the forgiver and little to do with the forgiven. It was forgiveness as power, as arrogance. This was all true, in an inverse way, about the Germans too. They reveled in their powerlessness. For them simply not being a Nazi counted as an accomplishment. For decades they had done really fine work not being Nazis—unlike the Austrians, who were still basically Nazis. The Germans had made not being Nazis into a central plank of their identity, and, as with the Jews, that meant they could be absolved of other ambitions. As uncomfortable as it made me, it was often easiest just to give in to the sense of Holocaust-related entitlement. Sometimes this took the form of standard guilt. When the synagogue in the Rykestraße reopened to great fanfare, I felt I had to go at least hear Kol Nidre, and I did, though I left after fifteen minutes. Other times it took odder forms, like the habit I developed of walking around listening to Paul Célan read “Todesfuge” on my iPod. But most of the time these feelings were desublimated, more crassly manifested. At a birthday party for an Icelandic artist a young and beautiful German Goth reclined in a bathtub. The bathtub was in the kitchen; it pulled down from a closet between the sink and the stove, like a Murphy bed. She lolled against the dry porcelain and told me she’d just finished her degree in Anti-Semitism Studies, with a focus on the post-Shoah relationship between West Germany and Israel. My friend Max was tall and handsome and obviously Jewish and made a habit of this sort of thing, and I pulled him aside to ask for the encouraging advice I knew he’d give. “The only way we—Germans and Jews alike—will heal these old wounds,” he said, “is if we take seriously our duty, difficult as it may often be, to take women like that home.” * The person who pulled off the bohemian thing most convincingly—that is, neither self-consciously nor apologetically—was Emilie, which was funny, because Emilie was also the only one of us who had an actual job—in fact, a whole series of them. The rest of us had come to Berlin to escape the authority of work, but Emilie hustled. She was always on the phone, screaming at someone in German customs to free up a six-foot carved totem from Uttar Pradesh in time for an opening that night; or running a gallery while her boss languished in Moabit Prison on charges of fraud (later acquitted); or curating a genuinely good group show in a former brewery, featuring work by some of our friends and later written up on the style-and-art-blog circuit by other of our friends. But she also managed to party as though it were her job. She worked harder than anybody I knew. Emilie’s life may have been in a constant state of crisis, but it was never an existential crisis. They were practical crises. Some of them might have landed her in bureaucratic labyrinths or trapped her on Baltic islands with street-art-dealing aristocrats, but none of them ever seemed to make her wonder why she was in Berlin, which was something she could be specific about: she sold art. One of the nice things about Berlin was that you didn’t have to be specific if you didn’t feel like it. If somebody asked you what you were up to in town, you could say you were an artist or just interested in art and leave it at that. They didn’t need to know anything more, didn’t have to worry you were withholding anything, because in part what you were communicating was that you probably weren’t a hundred percent sure what you were doing there. But your erstwhile interrogator almost certainly wasn’t sure what she was doing there, either, so everybody could get away with being broad-brush about things. This obtained in general. Part of the liberation of Berlin in Berlin was the permission to be vague. Emilie was different, though. She was good at the specific thing she did during the day, knew the right ways to talk to artists and collectors. She paid taxes, had been audited, had an expensive couch she tried not to get too many cigarette holes in. She was also loyal, and loyal in a way nobody in Berlin ever seemed to try very hard to be. She had principles, made a point of never sleeping with anybody her friends had slept with, and never cheated. Rarely cheated. All of these things were of a piece. The rest of us, at a certain point, began to worry that we were going out too much, felt mildly concerned that we were somehow betraying our true selves by not feeling held to account, not getting enough done—enough of what done we could rarely say—but Emilie never had that problem. She got done during the day what she had to get done and she did at night what she wanted to do. She was comfortable with her desire for some things because she was obligated to do others; she was able to oblige some things because she desired others. She bore the same relationship to us that Micah bore to the friends he had in Shanghai—shortly after I abandoned him he put in for a transfer overseas—who were always arguing about whose Mandarin had the best tones. Micah just went to the factory in Suzhou or Zhuhai or Taiyuan and got on with it. Emilie, so confident about how she spent her time, was the closest thing we had to a true doyenne, and she could have posted up at Bar Drei with the rest of us. But she was cut out for demimonde grandeur, and was delighted to include anybody who wanted in. For a while Emilie dated an endearingly feckless East German named Kevin, a sweet case study in the most extreme psychological effects of the nanny state. Kevin was notionally a DJ, but sometimes he was so busy partying, he would forget to play music; when he remembered, though, everybody had a good time, and even when he forgot, it was okay. At the beginning we’d hang out in his studio—he was also, notionally, a photographer—and he’d spin records. He and his studio-mate called the place the Bernsteinzimmer, the “Amber Room,” after the alleged hoard of still-missing Nazi gold. His DJ name was Kevin9/11 until Emilie forced him to change it. Then he called himself Kevolution. Emilie sighed and gave up. They had a pretty good relationship for a while, one mostly based on mutual respect for the intensity with which the other could party. Their terms of endearment were party related. “Du bist die Partymäuschen,” they would say with affectionate accuracy. “You are the little party mouse.” At four-thirty one December weekday morning, at the close of what felt like my first semester in Berlin, we left Kevolution behind at the Bernsteinzimmer to play or not play records as he continued to see fit. It was Alix’s birthday and we were near the Prenzlauer Berg–Pankow border. Emilie had heard about a new club, and six or ten of us were wandering around in the chilly dark looking for it. As we walked past one of the entrances to the Mauerpark, a disputably green zone where a strip of no-man’s-land once was, she noticed a single votive candle on a sidewalk. She swerved into the black lane. Someone asked where she thought she was going. “There’s a party in here,” she said, gesturing ahead of us into the dark. Someone asked how she knew. “Did you not see the votive candle? Whenever you see votive candles, you follow them, and they take you to a rave.” We followed the votive candles a kilometer into the park. The tree branches stitched a starless canopy against the black sky. Somebody picked his or her way along in heels. We tried to turn back. “Do whatever you like,” Emilie said, “but I’m going to this party.” “This is bonkers,” Alix said, and shivered. We walked for twenty more minutes, rounded a corner, and came through a copse to a Weimar-era toolshed. Inside there was a spectacular rave, with several rooms of music, an enormous amount of barely nibbled Turkish Fladenbrot, hundreds of people. “This is bonkers,” Alix said, and we went to dance. We left Emilie there at eight thirty in the morning and took the M10 tram in a wide arc back to our side of town. The streets were just beginning to steep in the squalid sub-lactic half-light of a winter Thursday. Commuters read nationalist tabloids of anti-immigrant sentiment. Alix folded herself under my arm and fell asleep, I had nothing to do for the rest of the day, and life to me felt almost unbearably full. * There was some pretense, in Berlin, of sexual adventure as part of the never-ending audition in recklessness. A close friend, Jordan, complained that his cohort, all the pretty young ubiquitous art boys, had developed an orgy habit, and that he wanted no part in it. He was conservative, he said, and did not like to sleep with his friends; he just wanted a monogamous relationship with a nice man. He was twenty-three and modeled part-time; he spoke seven or eight languages, including Arabic and Polish and Japanese, and I was constantly telling him to quit his gallery job and get into a linguistics PhD program, where he belonged. Jordan seemed to have healthy, unconflicted relationship to his sexuality, and we spent a lot of time talking about my dad. I told him that the main thing that had changed since my father came out was the innuendo. Actually, “innuendo” isn’t the right word, as it implies subtlety. There are many things for which you, or, more specifically, I, could reasonably blame my dad—deceit, say, or the sustained fantasy that a decade of complete and utter irresponsibility was the least the world owed him—but subtlety, especially about sex, is not one of them. When I was a kid, there had been signs—mostly in his flickering moods—that he had another life. After he came out, everything was explicit. When I was in my early and mid-twenties, during the periods in which we were talking to each other, I would come through New York and we would meet for dinner or a drink in Chelsea. We would walk past a bar with blacked-out windows and a studded leathery stegosaural bouncer and he would roll his eyes and say something like, “Oh, God, the Rawhide. You really gotta keep your back to the wall in there.” These stories made good anecdotes to trot out for my friends and girlfriends. They worked because they relied on the idea that I might have been expected to feel bad but instead took in the whole thing with detached amusement. My wacky gay-rabbi dad and his crude hijinks, I would imply, as if I were starring in the most progressive of sitcoms. I did not experience detached amusement. The innuendo always felt to me like bragging—bragging about the open eroticism of the life he led now, in contrast to his old, straitjacketed existence at home. This was, to some extent, the transparency I’d always wanted from him, but now it only made me feel lonely. In turn I made a big deal about my endurance. The first time he took me to a gay bar, a New Jersey mansion dive in teak paneling and threadbare velour with the characteristically unimaginative gay-bar name of the Raven, I asked for a beer, he bought me a Cosmo, and then he walked off to greet some friends he and Brett had met at a club in Fort Lauderdale. I stood in the corner and sipped my Cosmo—I figured he was watching out for my carb intake—and did my best to avoid eye contact with what I was later told were called trolls. The next morning I called my then girlfriend, the one I’d hung around in San Francisco for, to complain about how exposed I’d felt under so much perverse late-middle-aged male scrutiny. “Welcome,” she said, “to what it’s like to be a woman every single day.” I told that story for years, and the moral I made of her punch line was that everybody feels vulnerable sometimes and you ought to just get over yourself. In Berlin I went to gay bars all the time—which wasn’t hard, as in Berlin even the convenience stores often felt like de facto gay bars—to prove that I’d gotten over myself. For me this was the point of my dad’s Rawhide references: Get over yourself. When I talked to Jordan about this, I was both looking for sympathy and trying to needle him; I was in part proud of my dad’s candor, his ability to be so unashamed of his desire, his apparent lack of hang-ups. “Jordan,” I said, “aren’t you selling out the revolutionary promise of homosexuality? What about the idea that the ethics of sexual loyalty is a hetero hang-up your kind has gloriously overcome in favor of the ethics of betrayal?” What about Genet—what about his sense that the traditional monogamous relationship was “something of a protection racket,” as Adam Phillips put it in a review of an Edmund White memoir. I promise to pretend as though you’re the only thing that could possibly make me happy, it says, and you promise the same thing, and we’ll surely make each other miserable. Genet’s counterproposal on behalf of his generation of homosexuals? An intimacy of anonymity. His idea, Phillips writes, was that “so-called relationships were the place where one needn’t take anything personally.” Jordan was unfazed. “You just say that because you only fuck girls with boyfriends and you want to find some intellectual reason to think that’s okay, and because you know you yourself are dying for exactly that protection racket. You can’t stop looking for the perfect girl. Anyway, as far as gay people my age are concerned, what you’re talking about is the big problem with what your dad’s generation did to our generation. They grew up trying to be straight, so when they could finally fuck men, they went all crazy about it, and they still can’t stop fucking, and they’ve saddled us with the idea that gay life should always be this creepy free-for-all of fucking. But I’ve been gay since I knew how to talk, and all I want is my boyfriend and my dog, Miss Tilly, and a nice duvet and some DVDs. If you want to call that a protection racket, go right ahead, doll face. It’s what I want.” But there was still a part of me that felt as though I had to grow up and into the ethics of betrayal, that part of coming to Berlin was getting over petty jealousy and the childish desire for an impossibly complete presence, and what felt so terrible so often wasn’t the old sadness and jealousy but the guilt about still being hung up in the same old ways. * The only artist who made work that seemed to address, in a serious and useful way, what was going on in Berlin—the absence of authority, the tyranny of desire—was David Levine. David was tall and muscular and perpetually stubbled, his jaundiced eyes open wide in frequent disbelief, and he spoke with a dark, feathery rasp. In summer he wore frayed wifebeaters and in winter thermal undershirts and motorcycle boots with the ringed trusses clipped off. You could imagine him smoking while working out, smoking while swimming. We had friends in common in New York, as everybody else did, and he had impressive and successful ex-girlfriends. David was an experimental theater director and conceptual artist who thought the two worlds had something to learn from each other. Performance art had given up on the idea of rehearsal because it thought that authenticity could only derive from spontaneity, from unself-consciousness, which could make a performance feel uncanny and novel. But the authenticity part is always a red herring, David used to say. Well-acted, well-directed, and well-rehearsed theater could be just as moving, or as alienating, as any given performance-art tantrum. If you rehearse, if you employ all the traditional techniques the theater uses to create credibility, and only then take away the scaffolding, you could perhaps make something that would split the difference. Art doesn’t want to be seen as trying very hard, but the trick of the theater is that sometimes it’s only when you’re trying as hard as you possibly can that you seem effortless. David practiced forms of ritualized improvisation, or improvised ritual. His first really big piece—called Bauerntheater, it had been written up at great length in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the Times—closed shortly before I arrived in town. He’d rehearsed an actor in the role of a potato farmer in a previously untranslated Heiner Müller play about East German agricultural collectivization in the fifties, then put the guy in a field about an hour outside of Berlin and had him plant potatoes in full costume in the regional style of the day. He’d gotten a large grant from the German cultural ministry to do this, and it had gotten him a lot of good press. An arts journalist friend of his wrote yet another thing about Berlin artists for a Manhattan magazine, and the big pull-quote was David’s. It concerned the differences between being an artist in Berlin and New York. “In New York,” he said, “if you’re not making a hundred grand and sleeping with a lesbian, you’re nothing.” At Bar Drei one night after the story came out, he seemed distracted and I asked him why. “I’m worried,” he said, “that the story is going to piss off the lesbian I sleep with when I’m in New York.” Alix put her cigarette out. “And I wonder if it’ll also piss off the German cultural ministry that made Bauerntheater possible by giving you a hundred grand.” * David Levine’s next project after Bauerntheater, the first one I was around for, was called The Gallery Will Be Relocating over the Summer. It was a fake art opening that took its name from the fact that the real gallery that hosted it was supposed to be relocating over the summer. Then the gallerist had a kid with a young Spanish artist, starting posting about the Andalusian weather on Facebook, and was never heard from again. The fake opening was a final project for his students in a class he was teaching at the Freie Universität. Each student spent an entire semester studying the habits and affects of an art-world person—an artist, curator, gallerist—and showed up in character for the performance at the gallery, in the Brunnenstraße. All the newer galleries back then were in the Brunnenstrasse and they would coordinate their monthly openings in a way that turned the street into a block party. These were my favorite evenings of that first year—drinking free beer in the nine p.m. sunlight, parading around in the street, knowing that everybody you knew in the whole city was on that block and was going to an after-party where everyone was there and nobody ever left—though the art was rarely very accomplished. David liked to say that the Brunnenstraße was where everybody got a chance. He didn’t mean that cynically. “The most important thing to remember,” he said to me through the smoke at Bar Drei the day before his fake show was set to real open, “is that every artist is always making the best art he or she possibly can. You can call it bad art, if you want, and most of it is bad the way most of anything is bad, but there’s no grace in impugning the motivations behind it.” I felt greedy and often impatient for these lopsided moments with David, moments of instruction and clarifying tenderness and even the occasional reprimand. Over time I tried harder not to press him into a vigilance he was neither interested in nor prepared for, and I was eager for chances to reciprocate, to show him I was just as interested in friendship as I was in oversight. So I was happy when David asked Alix and me to write the fake press release for his fake show. We took the job very seriously, spent hours outside at the Turkish bakery working on it, but in the end our draft wasn’t all that distinguishable from the real press release. The fake opening had fake-real art on the walls, inspired by the real art of the characters under study, and real free booze, and a nonnegotiable locked-door duration of four hours. At seven p.m. David bicycle-locked the front door of the gallery. The only person inside in character as herself was an arts reporter in town, a friend of a friend whom we’d introduced to David at Bar Drei. He’d invited her to appear in the piece as herself, and she was flattered. “You’re like Peter Falk in Wings of Desire!” I said. She frowned. The real opening, i.e., the opening of David’s show, was in the courtyard outside, where we milled and drank the same free booze the fake people were real-drinking inside. Occasionally we looked in through the window to see what the fake attendees were up to. What they were up to looked largely the same as what we were up to, which was part of the point, but we were afraid that they were having a better time. After all, they had been licensed by hard work and careful direction to spend a few hours being different people, which meant they were drunkenly rolling around on the floor and wrecking the artwork and making the most of it. This made an even better point. We were ourselves at a real event, which meant our hearts weren’t in it, not the way theirs were. We were freer, but they were surer of their roles and we couldn’t help but look over our shoulders at them. The night was warm and there were a lot of free drinks and the after-party sounded increasingly auspicious and it had been a while, I realized, since I’d had such a nice time out at yet another art function in Berlin. The doors to the fake opening were unlocked at eleven. The New York arts reporter playing herself came out and held up her BlackBerry. Someone we knew in New York, or someone some of us knew and others had heard of, had gotten three quarters of a million dollars for his novel, which apparently included whimsical drawings. This was somehow not surprising, that news of ambition and focus and whimsy-related success in New York had come via the one New York media reporter playing herself inside a well-directed fake art opening in Berlin. It was the real toad in the imaginary garden. The real news from the fake opening had seemed an ill omen. I’d been in Berlin for a year and had no better idea what I was doing there than I had when I arrived; the mere lifting of constraint had not infused my life with purpose, and I did not feel any freer than I had in San Francisco. I’d come to Berlin at least in part to escape what I saw as a kind of generational malaise, and had discovered there a slightly different kind of generational malaise. It had simply become a nonstop moral holiday, and we lived in it, and there was always someone in town from New York to show off for. This is an alternative to waiting in line for cupcakes, was the implication. Two friends visited and had a threesome with a tied-up Swede. Another friend came and cheated on her boyfriend with a twenty-one-year-old male model who was writing his undergraduate thesis on Heidegger. They came to see dawn and to cheat and we took them out and in the process allowed ourselves a great time we didn’t have to take full responsibility for. But as time went on we felt less and less great about it. We finished the night at seven in the morning, long after the sun had risen too early and too hot over the river at Bar25, at eight in the wintry morning coming out of Berghain long before the sun painted its gray on gray in the slushy sky, at ten in the morning at the Mauerpark flea market before you’ve been home to sleep, at eleven in the morning taking a regional train to a crummy Baltic beach to doze it off. The visitors were always ready to go home after an amazing week. It was their vacation but it was our life, and it no longer seemed like what I’d wanted. At that time there was a song lyric that did not stop running through my mind. “You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan / and the next five years trying to be with your friends again.” I wanted old friends and Micah and meaningful work and to sleep with a woman I was in love with and to wake up in the morning. I wanted the innocent life I’d had in San Francisco but this time having had the experiences I’d had in Berlin. Even the spaces felt different to me. I no longer saw the aesthetic appeal of the postindustrial. We’d been pleased that the dilapidated buildings still stood, thought that the ruination—as opposed to Belle Époque elegance, or geometries of steel and glass—was a mark of our cold grit. But once things started to go bad, it seemed to me that we’d let the past persist merely to burlesque it. We sent up its quaint striving with athletic derangement. We kept the past around not for the sake of continuity but for the sake of rebuke. For a few months when I was out on my Middlemarch-avoiding walks I was drawn to the posters at bus stops asking for donations to shore up the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche. It had been built by the second kaiser in honor of the first one, and was mostly wrecked during the war. Since then it had been fastidiously maintained in its ruination, that it might stand as a warning. Every time it got too ruined, they had to beg the public for money to fix it up a little. It was a lot of effort to preserve an ideal state of decay. The effort involved seemed so pointless. “I think I’m having a crisis,” I said to David as we walked to his after-party. I felt sheepish about casting him once more in the mentor role, especially on the night of his big success, but it was probably exactly that big success that made me feel I needed so much from him. David fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it for me. “Of course you’re having a crisis. Look, everybody is having a crisis all of the time. You either feel like you’re too tied up and thus prevented from doing what you want to do, or you feel like you’re not tied up enough and have no idea what you want to do. The only thing that allows us any relief is what we tend to call purpose, or what I think about in terms of direction.” You deal with the crisis that is life by obeying some authority you despise, the authority of money or the authority of relationships or grad school or the authority of cupcakes, and in that case you’re freaked out all the time because you feel like you’re always being thwarted, or you deal with it by renouncing all authority, and in that case you’re freaked out because you’re entirely thrown back upon yourself all of the time in a way pretty much nobody can handle. The main problem with desires, Berlin made clear, is that they’re not nearly as authoritative as we wish they were. A sense of purpose allows for both the comfort of obedience and the dignity of autonomy. It represents relief from feeling servile and relief from having to worry at every moment about what, precisely, we think we might want right now, what costs we’re willing to pay. The question is: How can you find some structure that allows you to begin to understand what you want without forcing you to pay constant attention to the fluctuation of endlessly conflicting desires? And how can you realize that, whatever the situation, you’re probably already getting what you want on some level, whether you know it or not? “Everybody is in a crisis all the time,” David finished, “and everybody, at the same time, under some sort of cover, is also pretty much doing what they want. Life is the crisis of doing what you want. Which means: Hold people accountable, but try to be understanding. Nobody gets off the hook just because they’re in a crisis, but you can have sympathy for them as they hang on it. The hook, I mean.” We reached the bar and he lit another cigarette. Just before we entered the bar, he turned to me one last time. “You are in a crisis, and you are also doing what you want.” * Eventually our crises began to resolve themselves, or maybe it was just that we’d grown bored of these particular crises and were ready for different ones. After one long week of inventive partying, Emilie called Kevolution from their apartment and asked when he would be home. It was ten to midnight on a Friday. “I’ll be home in twenty minutes,” Kevin said. He walked in at ten on Monday morning. Emilie threw her glass of orange juice at his head, narrowly missing an Alec Soth print worth ten thousand dollars, and asked where the fuck he’d been. “Unterwegs,” he said. Under way. Emilie broke up with him then, or maybe it was a little later, and Kevin was furious. He took back all he’d said before. “Du bist nicht die Partymäuschen. Du bist ein Scheiß-Ami-Bitch.” It was cruel, but he knew he’d lost something good. She moved on to a guy with a job, a guy who could afford to go on actual vacations instead of trying to live in one. Alix, for her part, was also moving on, going to graduate school in New York and some measure of stability and routine that, she feared, would drive her bonkers. She kept her place in Berlin, though, just in case. At the time I was happy for her and sad for myself. I’d thought I’d gotten used to the transience of the place, the constant new crashes and rescues that changed the demography of the shipwreck, but I hadn’t. At least not in her case. Right around the time she was leaving they were closing the Building, some sort of artist-run space with wishy pedagogical ideas in the back basement of a supermarket wedged in between some East German tower blocks. For their final weekend of events, the people who ran the Building had invited their constituents to take an hour and do whatever they wished with it. Alix called her hour “The Event at the Building: Pedagogy as Potentiality in Reverse” and wrote a press release for it. It was to be listed as a lecture with a voguish description. The audience would file in and Alix would hand out boards and paper and charcoal and present a live model, and the people who expected a lecture on Rancière would have an hour of drawing from life. Unfortunately for Alix, the Building’s press release, which Alix had long relied upon for its inanity, was in this case perversely clear: it went ahead and revealed the surprise. Alix tried to cancel the class, no longer saw a point, but her nude model was insistent. Alix wrote me a frustrated e-mail. “The model won’t not get naked. It’s part of her art practice, she says.” Until then nobody knew the nude art model had an art practice. The nude model with the new art practice asked if I would document her nudity textually as part of a future project she was considering, on intimacy. Weren’t there going to be photographers there, I asked, not to mention a whole room of people drawing your nude figure? Yes, she said. But she wanted a text. Sort of like a live blog without the Internet. I shouldn’t have been at all surprised, but by then I was so tired. Everything in the art world required extensive documentation. They didn’t believe in preparation, but they did believe in proof. I wondered then if the difference between people who believed in preparation and those who believed in proof, like the antagonism David described between those who believed in rehearsal and those who believed in spontaneity, wasn’t the difference between those who worked constantly for something that would endure and those who sought to capture something that occurred once. In Berlin photographs were taken of performances. Writers wrote about the photographs. Bloggers posted about the writers. Installation artists installed pieces about the bloggers. Performance artists performed in the installations, hoping to get photographed. Photographers shot pictures of the bloggers, hoping to get in magazines. The Berlin Wall had existed primarily on television and in magazines. Berlin galleries existed primarily in Frieze and the social diary of Artforum.com. Despite the confusion of the uncharacteristically lucid press release for the Event at the Building, most of the people were somehow surprised by the revelation that the fake lecture was going to be a real drawing class, which led one to believe that Alix was actually the only person reading these press releases in the first place. Everybody took it seriously. These were people who were very comfortable with their spectacular emancipation, but it had been years since they’d drawn from life, if they ever had. Everyone was quiet and absorbed and Alix shone like her crazy aunt Terry as she directed the changes in pose. She was immensely pleased. At Bar Drei afterward we all felt clearer than we had in some time. David was inspired, and talked about his own version of a drawing class. He said he always thought about going back to actual theater directing, if he could do what he wanted. We ran out of cigarettes and walked out, past the Volksbühne, where he’d recently taken me to see Frank Castorf’s version of A Streetcar Named Desire. He called it Endstation Amerika—the Williams estate refused to let him use the name—and it lasted five hours. Kowalski was a grizzled Polish biker with roots in Solidarity. There was nudity and barbershop-quartet Britney Spears, and at one point Mitch forced Blanche to read off some stage directions from the supertitles. The actors may have been drunk. We’d both found it a shade too long. “You know what the single most radical thing I could do in the Berlin theater would be?” David asked as he looked up at the stolid engaged columns of the Volksbühne. “I’d put on an old-fashioned naturalistic staging, in full period costume, of The Cherry Orchard.” But pulling that off was going to take some time and a lot of preparation. The last show David put up while I still had an apartment in Berlin was called Hopefuls. It consisted of a few thousand headshots and cover letters seeking actor’s representation, which he plastered with hidden logic on his gallery’s walls. The point of all this was to represent the actor’s commitment to plasticity, to potential. One of the cover letters said that the actor had been told his range extended from Hayden Christensen to Halle Berry. This was because he was, he went on, “ethically dubious.” These were people campaigning vigorously for direction, and we needed to see them as gauche because we so acutely felt the same way. They were all doing the best they could to do something they cared about, and very few of them would succeed. We were doing as little as possible and pretended being in Berlin made us better than them. I stood in the room full of headshots and each one seemed to say, “I must change my life.” We took out our frustrations on Berlin’s attempts to resemble New York. A lounge called Tausend opened up under the S-Bahn tracks near the Friedrichstraße station. Tausend means “thousand,” and it was not at all a Berlin name. A Berlin name would be “One” or “Two” or, at the very most, “Six.” Tausend also had a strict door policy, which was unusual. The night it opened David sent me a series of texts. “SHOCKINGLY NY 90S.” “I’M SITTING ON A GRAY FELT BANQUETTE.” “BLACK LEATHER CAR COATS OVER WHITE V-NECK T-SHIRTS, AND ONE PORK-PIE HAT.” “JAMIROQUAI.” The whole point of Berlin was that there was nobody from college who worked in finance and asked if you rented or owned, nobody who blogged about media gossip, and no places like Tausend. Which meant that when a place like Tausend opened, it suggested that perhaps Berlin was over. But then Emilie would take us to the Damensalon, a former cosmetician’s in Neukölln with a bare interior, a plywood bar, and a vast sub-basement dance floor, and it was clear that nothing was over, that the very idea of a place being over, just like the very idea of a place being hip in the first place, was absurd. It had everything to do with the person saying it and nothing to do with the place itself. What the word “over” really means is that your expectations of a place, your fantasies of who you might have become there, have been confounded by the persistence of you. You want a place to be strong enough to resist the patterns you force onto it, and there are places that can do that for a while. As it became increasingly clear that my era of inconsequence was not going to end in Berlin, as I’d anticipated, and as it had for Wenders’s angel, with the new taste of coffee—with, that is to say, the ability to feel as though what was in front of me was enough, the strength to sit alone in a room and not wonder what was going on in other, secret, more crowded rooms—I began to hope that it might end with Berlin. If moving to Berlin had not left me altered, alert and grateful and decisive, perhaps moving away would. Or perhaps just moving with direction would, waking up each day knowing I had committed myself to spending daylight walking as far as I could toward Santiago de Compostela. I didn’t actually care about what it meant to arrive there, or at least not the way a religious Catholic might. The word “pilgrim” comes from the Latin per agrum, “beyond the fields,” and for a long time in a lot of places it was pretty much the only pretext you had to leave home. I didn’t need a pretext to leave home, but I did want an excuse to have a series of structured days. I thought it might be a redemptive exercise in pointless direction, and I hoped in the end it might give me a better sense for where I stood.