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.

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 coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

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 I huddle in the lee of my paper mountain like Adam in the bushes and pick up a book, and my eyes open panic-stricken on a world other than my own, because when I start reading I’m somewhere completely different, I’m in the text, it’s amazing, I have to admit I’ve been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I’ve been in the very heart of truth.

yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don’t know.

I have a physical sense of myself as a bale of compacted books, the seat of a tiny pilot light of karma, like the flame in a gas refrigerator, an eternal flame I feed daily with the oil of my thoughts, which come from what I unwittingly read during work in the books I am now taking home in my briefcase. So I walk home like a burning house, like a burning stable, the light of life pouring out of the fire, fire pouring out of the dying wood, hostile sorrow lingering under the ashes.

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 a long time thereafter I would hear the crunch of human skeletons whenever my hydraulic press entered its final phase and crushed the beautiful books with a force of twenty atmospheres, I would hear the crunch of human skeletons and feel I was grinding up the skulls and bones of press-crushed classics, the part of the Talmud that says: “For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.”

The swords of Damocles that I’ve hung from my bathroom and bedroom ceilings force me to make as many trips for beer at home as at work: it’s my only defense against a beautiful misery.

and when she glided up to me, what did I see on one of her skis, just behind the boot, but an enormous turd, a turd the size of the paperweight the poet Vrchlický celebrated in sublime verse, and then and there I knew we had come to the second chapter in the life of Manča, who, never having known glory, would never relinquish shame.