One afternoon, many years ago, while walking around Victoria, BC during a break in a conference, I saw an apartment for rent in a neighborhood I knew nothing about but had a yen to look at, and even to go farther, to rent and disappear forever from wife and sons, extended family, work, profession, colleagues, friends, everything in short. It was just a passing fancy, but when I recounted it in passing to a class of students, they were plainly bewildered at a kind of thinking that may only possess someone experiencing a pronounced mid-life crisis. But the only unusual thing about this passing fancy was that it involved complete disappearance and contained no thought for tomorrow. I’ve regularly included family and friends in the other parallel lives I’ve conjured for myself in places I’ve lived in for weeks, months, years at a time, starting with San Francisco and moving on to Santa Fe, London, and, most rhapsodically Venice, blissfully oblivious to the blight of tourists and people like me with the money to afford what locals cannot. I’m compelled to revisit this subject as I respond to email and Facebook messages from friends who live in such places, anticipating that I will likely never be able to visit them again given changes in my health.

But there’s more to this subject than wishful thinking allows, something that has to do with parallel lives, lives not simply imagined but lived at the level of vicarious experience we enjoy when we’re deep into a film or a book. At this moment, as I absorb myself in reports and images of the floods and mudslides and destroyed beaches in Northern California, particularly in my former neighborhoods in Santa Cruz, I am, as it were, there, living through the experiences that my former profs and friends are enduring, seeing myself swimming around the now broken pier in Capitola, helping Lorre and Ted bail water from their basement in Felton, wondering how, if I were still living in my single exit canyon in Felton, I would survive. The vicariousness of my Northern California dreaming is enabled, of course, by these specific connections, as it has not been during my 11-month long immersion in the words and images and reports coming out of Ukraine, where the people I am “meeting” vicariously seem to be kept alive by dreams of personal survival and self-determination that are unimaginable at this distance.

If Ukraine seems to me a place I can’t dream myself into, Venice has been for me, since my initial 6-week submersion there in 2008, nothing less than “une cité pleine des rêves,” a place that has been dreaming dreams of itself for 1200 years. Oddly enough, fortuitously even, what made me feel so at home there from the first was the sense of living where so many had died, a feeling I found comforting since it made death seem less the particular, distinguished thing than the established fate of millions who had breathed the same fetid air and embraced the same glorious sights and sounds on offer for centuries. You may hear today nothing but the sounds of your feet on paving stones and the drift of passing conversations if you choose to walk the backstreets of Cannaregio or Castello late at night or early in the morning. But the ghosts of the past are listening, craving your admiration for what they have made. In Venice, the living are layered on the dead, depend upon their artistry and expertise, their cunning at having finessed ways of living with and above the water, now under threat by the mountainous cruise ships that old Ezra would have abhorred as he abhorred everything that smacked of the modern, except, of course, the willed opacity of his poems.