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,

For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting it all in my hydraulic press, and three times a week it is transported by truck to train and then on to the paper mill, where they snap the wires and dump my work into alkalis and acids strong enough to dissolve the razor blades I keep gouging my hands with.

For thirty-five years now I’ve been compacting waste-paper, and if I had it all to do over I’d do just what I’ve done for the past thirty-five years.

and as soon as the present war was over, my friends the academic sewersweeps informed me, the winning side would again break down, like gases and metals and all organic matter, into two dialectically opposed camps, the struggle for supremacy bringing life back to life, the desire for conflict resolution promising imminent equilibrium, the world never stumbling for an instant.

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.

And while the sewers of Prague provide the scene for a senseless war between two armies of rats, the cellars are headquarters for Prague’s fallen angels, university-educated men who have lost a battle they never fought, yet continue to work toward a clearer image of the world.

and I knew it would end with a celebration lasting only till they could find a motive to start fighting again.

because those wild flies refuse to give up the idea that life is at its most beautiful in gloriously rancid, decomposing blood.

“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.

And the more I compacted the cheering men, women, and children, the more I thought of my Gypsy girl, who had never cheered, who had wanted nothing more than to feed the fire, make her potato goulash, and fill my large pitcher with beer, nothing more than to break her bread like the wafer at Communion and look into the stove door, transfixed by the flames and heat and noise of the fire, the song of the fire, which she had known since childhood and which held sacred ties to her people.

By now I had calmed down enough to realize that the machine compacted and baled whole runs of books, and through the glass wall I could see trucks pulling up with boxes of books piled to the brim, the entire printing of a book going straight into the pulper before a single page could be sullied by the human eye, brain, or heart.

Gone were the days of small joys, of finds, of books thrown away by mistake: these people represented a new way of thinking.

no, they just went on working, pulling covers off books and tossing the bristling, horrified pages on the conveyor belt with the utmost calm and indifference, with no feeling for what the book might mean, no thought that somebody had to write the book, somebody had to edit it, somebody had to design it, somebody had to set it, somebody had to proofread it, somebody had to make the corrections, somebody had to read the galley proofs, and somebody had to check the page proofs, print the book, and somebody had to bind the book, and somebody had to pack the books into boxes, and somebody had to do the accounts, and somebody had to decide that the book was unfit to read, and somebody had to order it pulped, and somebody had to put all the books in storage, and somebody had to load them onto the truck, and somebody had to drive the truck here, where workers wearing orange and baby- blue gloves tore out the books’ innards and tossed them onto the conveyor belt, which silently, inexorably jerked the bristling pages off to the gigantic press to turn them into bales, which went on to the paper mill to become innocent, white, immaculately letter-free paper, which eventually would be made into other, new, books.

and so it was that Manča, with nothing but a bed and a clear-cut goal, built herself a house.

what I saw was a large gilt upright bathtub with Seneca lying upright in it just after he had slashed the veins in his wrist, thereby proving to himself how right he was to have written that little book I so loved, On Tranquillity of Mind.

but when I looked down, I was still standing in that awful dog turd. And when I looked up, who should I see coming out of her gate but the girl I had the date with, so I undid the strap, pulled my foot out of the purple sock, and left sandal, sock, and bouquet under the notice board of our soccer club and fled into the fields, where I sat and meditated on that fateful omen, because even then I had vowed to spend my life compacting wastepaper for the access it would give me to fine books.

Perhaps he was the one who, last year at the Holešovice slaughterhouse, put a knife to my neck, shoved me into a corner, took out a slip of paper, and read me a poem celebrating the beauties of the countryside at Říčany, then apologized, saying he hadn’t found any other way of getting people to listen to his verse.

and at the moment of truth I see my tiny Gypsy girl, whose name I never knew, we are flying the kite through the autumn sky.