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First published January 1, 1973
Against mountains of grayish-yellow, bottle-shaped pears and oversize ruby-red apples, a basket of fresh figs: delicate pink, delicate gray, delicate brown, delicate purple; milky drops on the stalks (that is how, according to Ferenc's description, I imagine the poetry of Szabó Lõrinc)
One day my obituary will contain the words: He carted around a lot of books and fruit
But there is absolutely no sense in the very natural question: So why didn't you break with the Nazis, why didn't you defect? why didn't you resist, and so on? Yet this is the very question that is always being asked, especially by young people. They have the right to this question, of course, only that they demand from each single impact the immediate and direct effect of the sum of the impacts which finally brings about the break. To be sure, the last drop that finally causes the glass to overflow is also just a drop like the preceding ones, but it happens to be the last one, and many others had to precede it, and each one was necessary and often drops fell into the glass that were bigger than that last one, and when they fell their sole effect was one of preparation, of indispensible preparation for that one last drop....
Do what you like, you can't get away from Auschwitz.
We have brcome used to associating the idea of fatalism with that of pessimism, but in fact there is also a thoroughly optimistic form of fatalistic thinking. Brecht's words that Socialism is as good or as bad as we make it is a warning against precisely this fatal belief in automation....
It is very odd, but we have got into the habit of accepting a necessary atttribute of a given entity as reason to exclude it instead off learning to see its positive aspects. Thus we have sought, for instance, to reduce abstract art ad absurdum by--and this can be done--laboriously proving that it is not concrete, instead of exploring its possibilities as a transitional phase...
What was it that so fascinated me on first reading Lukács? ...least of all what was Lukács [as an individual author]...It was my first experience of the Other in intellectual terms, my first encounter with Marxism...That someone (or rather: that a method) should see relationships, lines, processes, inherent laws, where we were accustomed only to barren dates, dates in the framework of dates...all this was quite simply a revelation, and what took my breath away was the emergence of my own fate as I suddenly grasped from books: tua res agitur [per Google translate: your agitated soul]...In war literature, for example, the irresistible fascination of the crudest depictions of battles and atrocities that was my experience, how could it possibly turn up in literary history...
and this upheaval was suddenly invaded by the reports about Nuremberg and Auschwitz...
I knew nothing of Auschwitz, knew nothing about Auschwitz...
Far away on the horizon, beyond the river, where the river meets the sky, a paler wisp--what is it? Mist rising from the water; mist sinking from the sky? Danube and sky are a delicate gray-blue, they would be indistinguishable were they not separated by the minuteness of that whiter wisp. But what is that wisp? Is it a row of hills, a river bank, is it a wisp or is it transition itself, the physical manifestation of an idea?
This In-between between Danube and Sky is indescribable, like one of those translations into the void which Mallarmé tried to put into words...Could language express it, just this, this transition, but precisely it? Perhaps; a labor of days, and what would be gained? Much: an insight into what language can do.
But there is absolutely no sense in the very natural question: So why didn't you break with the Nazis, why didn't you defect, why didn't you resist, and so on? Yet this is the very question that is always being asked, especially by young people. They have a right to this question, of course, only that they demand from each single impact the immediate and direct effect of the sum of impacts which finally brings about the break. To be sure, the last drop that causes the glass to overflow is also just a drop like the preceding ones, but it happens to be the last one, and many others had to precede it, and each one was necessary, and often drops fell into the glass that were bigger than that last one, and when they fell their sole effect was one of preparation, of indispensable preparation for that one last drop