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So I learned that money could buy you not just a beautiful girl, money could buy you poetry too.
Now, the largest firm in the world is the Catholic church, and it trades in something that no man has ever seen, no man has ever touched, and no man has ever encountered since the world began, and that something is called God.
Here, in the Hotel Tichota, I also learned that the ones who invented the notion that work is ennobling were the same ones who drank and ate all night long with beautiful women on their knees, the rich ones, who could be as happy as little children.
The ceremony was like a High Mass, and Mr. Salamon knelt most devoutly of all, and we slowly approached the altar on our knees, and everything was alive with flowers and gold leaf and the choir sang the Missa Solemnis, and at the very climax the cameraman gave the sign, the Bambino was consecrated, and an ordinary object became a devotional article, because it was blessed by the Archbishop and now radiated supernatural power and could bestow grace.
I learned that feeling victorious makes you victorious, and that once you lose heart or let yourself be discouraged the feeling of defeat will stay with you for the rest of your life, and you’ll never get back on your feet again, especially in your own country and your own surroundings, where you’re considered a runt, an eternal busboy.
Only now have I got to the core of it, that what made these people beautiful was knowing that they might never see each other again. The New Man was not the victor, loud-mouthed and vain, but the man who was humble and solemn, with the beautiful eyes of a terrified animal. And so through the eyes of these lovers—because even married couples became lovers again with the danger of the front hanging over them—I learned to see the countryside, the flowers on the tables, the children at play, and to see that every hour is a sacrament.
also learned that the closest that one person can be to another is through silence, an hour, then a quarter-hour, then the last few minutes of silence when the carriage has arrived, or sometimes a military britzska, or a car. Two silent people rise to their feet, gazing long at each other, a sigh, then the final kiss, then the man standing in the britzska, then the man sitting down and the vehicle driving off up the hill, the final bend in the road, the waving handkerchief.
The murderer said he’d killed his father. Now the commander held the candelabra, with the candles still dripping wax, up to the murderer’s face, and somehow he became sober, as though he was delighted that fate had sent him a man that night who was looking for his mother after he’d killed his own father, and who now was standing where the commander himself often stood as a murderer, whether he murdered on orders or of his own free will. And I, who had served an emperor and had often seen the unbelievable come true, I saw this imperial German state murderer, this wholesale murderer with
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When I was a waiter I used to love it when at least once a day all those doormen and superintendents and stokers would come out of their buildings, turn their faces upward, and from the abyss of the Prague streets gaze at the strip of sky overhead, at the clouds, to see what time it really was, according to nature and not by the clock.
And the unbelievable that came true stayed with me, and I believed in the unbelievable, in the star that had followed me through life, and with its gleam constantly before my eyes I began to believe in it more and more, because it had made me a millionaire, and now that I had been brought to my knees I realized that my star was brighter than ever, that only now would I be able to see its true brightness, because my eyes had been weakened by everything I had lived through, weakened so that they could see more and know more.
When I mentioned serving the Emperor of Ethiopia, it was a way of making fun of myself, because I was independent now and beginning to find the presence of other people irksome, and I felt that in the end I would have to speak only with myself, that my own best friend and companion would be that other self of mine, that teacher inside me with whom I was beginning to talk more and more.
But as I used a grub hoe and a shovel on the road, I used memory to keep the road of my life open into the past, so I could take my thoughts backward to where I wanted to begin remembering.
Not the meaning of what used to be or what happened a long time ago, but discovering the kind of road you’d opened up and and had yet to open up, and whether there was still time to attain the serenity that would secure you against the desire to escape from your own solitude, from the most important questions that you should ask yourself.
As a matter of fact whenever I was in the pub I realized that the basic thing in life is questioning death, wanting to know how we’ll act when our time comes, and that death, or rather this questioning of death, is a conversation that takes place between infinity and eternity, and how we deal with our own death is the beginning of what is beautiful, because the absurd things in our lives, which always end before we want them to anyway, fill us, when we contemplate death, with bitterness and therefore with beauty.
I became a laughingstock in the pub by asking each one of the people where he wanted to be buried. At first they were shocked, but then they laughed till they cried at the idea, and then they would ask me where I wanted to be buried—that is, if I was lucky enough to be found in time, because they hadn’t found the last road mender but one until spring, by which time he’d been eaten by shrews and mice and foxes, so all they had to bury was a small bundle of bones, like a bunch of asparagus or beef trimmings and soup bones.
When you enjoy something, then you’ve got it, you idiots, you evil, stupid, criminal sons of men, he would say, and he’d browbeat us until he got us where he wanted us, open to poetry, to objects, to wonder, and able to see that beauty always points to infinity and eternity.
the only true man of the world was one who could become anonymous, who could shed himself.
and so try, by writing, to ask myself about myself.
