Too Loud a Solitude

by Bohumil Hrabal

I 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.

How much more beautiful it must have been in the days when the only place a thought could make its mark was the human brain and anybody wanting to squelch ideas had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn’t have helped, because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain.

If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.

and placed a volume of Immanuel Kant in his hands, opening it to a beautiful text that has never failed to move me: “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.”

Twenty-one sunflowers lit up the dark cellar and the few mice left shivering for want of paper, and one mouse came up and attacked me, jumping on its hind legs and trying to bite me or knock me over, straining its tiny body, leaping at my leg and gnawing at my wet soles, and each time I brushed it away, gently, it would fling itself at my shoe until finally it ran out of breath and sat in a corner staring at me, staring me right in the eye, and all at once I started trembling, because in that mouse’s eyes I saw something more than the starry firmament above me or the moral law within me. Like a flash of lightning Arthur Schopenhauer appeared to me and said, “The highest law is love, the love that is compassion,” and I realized why Arthur hated strongman Hegel, and I was glad that Hegel and Schopenhauer weren’t leading opposing armies, because the two of them would wage the same war as those two rat armies in the sewers of Prague.

I always loved twilight: it was the only time I had the feeling that something important could happen.

And as usual I thought of Frantík Šturm, the sacristan of Holy Trinity, who collected books and magazines on the subject of aviation, because he was convinced that Icarus was Jesus’ forerunner, the only difference being that Icarus fell from the sky into the sea, whereas Jesus was launched by an Atlas rocket, which can lift five thousand and eight hundred pounds to a three-hundred-and-fifty-mile orbit, and is circling His earthly kingdom to this day.

“From here on in, my boy, you’re on your own. You’re going to have to force yourself to go out and see people and enjoy yourself, playacting until you give up the ghost, because from here on in it’s just one melancholy circle after another and going forward means coming back, that’s right, progressus ad originem equals regressus ad futurum and your brain is nothing but a hydraulic press of compacted thought.”