Too Loud a Solitude

by Bohumil Hrabal

am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me.

My education has been so unwitting I can’t quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books,

the

years. Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and co...

When my eye lands on a real book and looks past the printed word, what it sees is disembodied thoughts flying through air, gliding on air, living off air, returning to air, because in the end everything is air, just as the host is and is not the blood of Christ.

no, I loathe drunkards, I drink to make me think better, to go to the heart of what I read, because what I read I read not for the fun of it or to kill time or fall asleep;

But just as a beautiful fish will occasionally sparkle in the waters of a polluted river that runs through a stretch of factories,

I can be by myself because I’m never lonely, I’m simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.

“For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.”

Most of all I enjoy central-heating control rooms, where men with higher education, chained to their jobs like dogs to their kennels, write the history of their times as a sort of sociological survey and where I learned how the fourth estate was depopulated and the proletariat went from base to superstructure and how the university-trained elite now carries on its work.

had led to their immediate breakdown into two groups, two opposing clans, two tightly organized rodent factions engaged at this very moment in a life-and-death struggle for supremacy

that the only thing on earth worthy of fear is a situation that is petrified, congealed, or dying, and the only thing worthy of joy is a situation where not only the individual but also society as a whole wages a constant battle for self-justification.

Know thy shame and preserve thy glory. A shining example, that woman.

realized for the first time how important their age was for an understanding of their teachings,

“Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing wonder—the starry firmament above me and the moral law within me,” but, changing my mind, I leafed through the younger Kant and found an even more beautiful passage: “When the tremulous radiance of a summer night fills with twinkling stars and the moon itself is full, I am slowly drawn into a state of enhanced sensitivity made of friendship and disdain for the world and eternity.”

It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I’d seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence.

At first I thought she put so much wood on the fire just to win me over, but then I realized it was in her, the fire was in her, she couldn’t live without fire.

we looked at each other more in the dark than by the light of day.

The heavens are not humane, but I’d forgotten compassion and love.

So for thirty-five years I’d lived with, lived through, a daily Sisyphus complex, the kind so beautifully described for me by Messrs.

I realized that Manča had unwittingly become what she never dreamed of becoming, that she had gone farther than anyone I’d ever known.

while she, who had always hated books, became what she was meant to be, the kind of person people write about,

height. As I left, her wings shone in the night like two brightly lit window...