The Melancholy of Resistance

by László Krasznahorkai

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...