Time Shelter

by Georgi Gospodinov

in order to survive there, in a new place, you had to cut off the past and to throw it to the dogs. (I could never do that.) To be merciless toward the past. Because the past itself is merciless. That obsolete organ, like some appendix, which otherwise would become inflamed, it would throb and ache. If you can survive without it, better to cut it out and get rid of it; if not, well, then you’d better suck it up.

The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back.

Somebody has cut the power to the rooms of your own body.

(Actually, it is precisely the unsuccessful suicide attempt that is a real tragedy, the successful one is merely a procedure.)

Can a person be gathered up like that, piece by piece, through the memories of others, and what would you get in the end? Would some Frankensteinian monster emerge from all that? Something patched together from absolutely incompatible memories and ideas from so many people?

Never, ever visit a place you left as a child after a long absence. It has been replaced, emptied of time, abandoned, ghostly. There. Is. Nothing. There.

It’s awful that I can’t forget them and (I would never admit this to them) that I miss them. I miss myself, too.

You can’t make a museum to preserve something that has never left.

You have to constantly remember that you are supposed to forget something. Surely that’s how every ideology functions.

When it comes to making trouble, even a lazy man works hard.

When people with whom you’ve shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually, they take the whole thing, since there’s no such thing as half a past. It’s as if you’ve torn a page in half lengthwise and you’re reading the lines only to the middle, and the other person is reading the ends.

Warning, history in the rearview mirror is always closer than it appears …

God is not dead. God has forgotten. God has dementia.