Today we take a beautiful boatride. This is not supposed to be a touristic site but the boatride through the canals of St. Petersburg, passing all the beautiful facades and museums, the rattling Russian voice - don't forget to bring your Russian friends! - explains about the house where Pushkin lived, the tsar's palaces, the area where Dostojewski strolled as he pondered about his great novels, and it concludes the trip going out on the Neva, breeze in your hair. This, the Hermitage, the Dostojewski house, the Kunstkammer, a stroll over the Nevsky, make a great stay in St. Petersburg. Order your personal ticket at... etcetera. It is good for the soul too. It is really a very nice place to be, as a modern city (some might concern her a bit too expensive) St. Petersburg is a blend of haste and calmness, of frantic activity and relaxation. There are so many corners to discover, so many anecdotes if you are in love with Russian literature, and so many smiles - you will be willing to go back to her. Just one small thing. Please don't call her "Peter".
It can suddenly end. There will be a next sentence one day, a last utterance we need a last breath for, perhaps it will be an arbitrary and banal remark, or a careful recapitulation of our life's thinking. That one last sentence, what if we miss it? What if we prepare ourselves for it, as good as we can, I suppose that will always be imperfect but that is another story, we prepare ourselves for it as we see the day approaching and then it turns out we have been mistaken. It is not our last breath. Of course it catches us by surprise anyway, no matter in which direction we run. Our vanity has been boundless, we tried to prepare for this? Didn't we know there will be a breath after the last one, a breath we don't even get to breathe? I think we should just be less concerned with that. That said, our words will still in the end sum up to some "total", a body of text that will be interpreted depending on our level of fame. And there will be a last sentence, it will be turned and twisted and molded into whichever shape they want; we can't do anything about that so we shouldn't care. And yet... we might have the chance to play a little joke on our receptors. Something better than hey I own Asklepios a cock.
