The Melancholy of Resistance

by László Krasznahorkai

Though even this did not go without the odd hiccup, for while the roguishly grinning figure of Earth confronted his slowly sobering audience and completed the complex manoeuvre of two orbits round the lanky Sun with embarrassing and acrobatic ease, the Moon keeled over as if poleaxed by news of some terrible misfortune as soon as Valuska touched him, and despite every well-intentioned precaution all attempts to set him on his feet again proved sad failures, so that even he, in the midst of his enthusiastic running about and inspired if constantly stuttering monologue, had to admit it might be better to replace the heavily indisposed warehouseman with some more useful assistant.

Despite vain efforts to understand and experience what precisely his ‘dear friends’ wanted from each other, he confronted the slow tide of human affairs with a sad incomprehension, dispassionately and without any sense of personal involvement, for the greater part of his consciousness, the part entirely given over to wonder, had left no room for more mundane matters, and (to his mother’s inordinate shame and the extreme amusement of the locals) had ever since then trapped him in a bubble of time, in one eternal, impenetrable and transparent moment. He walked, he trudged, he flitted—as his great friend once said, not entirely without point—‘blindly and tirelessly … with the incurable beauty of his personal cosmos’ in his soul (for decades now he had gazed at the same sky above him, and trod much the same route of concrete and weeds beneath), and if his life had anything that might be called a history at all, it consisted of those thirty-five years of ever deepening orbits from the time he left the immediate precincts of Maróthy Square to when his tours encompassed the whole town, for the startling truth was that in every other respect he remained exactly what he had been in childhood and whatever has been said about his destiny the same, with equal justice, might be said about his mind, which underwent no significant change, for the sense of awe—even over twice thirty-five years—is ahistorical.

greasy peasant hats,

Could this, he wondered, be a form of the last judgement? No trumpets, no riders of the apocalypse but mankind swallowed without fuss or ceremony by its own rubbish?

Don’t delude yourselves, I’ll have the whole stinking place behind bars, this filthy hole where every godforsaken idiot behaves as if he were the centre and keeper of the universe, God blast him! Catastrophe! Of course! Last judgement! Horseshit! It’s you that are the catastrophe, you’re the bloody last judgement, your feet don’t even touch the ground, you bunch of sleepwalkers. I wish you were dead, the lot of you. Let’s make a bet,’ and here he shook Nadabán by the shoulders, ‘that you don’t even know what I’m talking about!! Because you don’t talk, you “whisper” or “expostulate”; you don’t walk down the street but “proceed feverishly”; you don’t enter a place but “cross its threshold”, you don’t feel cold or hot, but “find yourselves shivering” or “feeling the sweat pour down you”! I haven’t heard a straight word for hours, you can only mew and caterwaul; because if a hooligan throws a brick through your window you invoke the last judgement, because your brains are addled and filled up with steam, because if someone sticks your nose in shit all you do is sniff, stare and cry “sorcery!” What would really be sorcery, you degenerates, is if someone were to wake you up and you realized that you lived not on the moon but in Hungary, with north at the top and south at the bottom, in a place where Monday is the first day of the week and January the first month of the year! You haven’t the faintest notion of anything, you couldn’t tell a trench mortar from three stacks of air-r...