Time Shelter

by Georgi Gospodinov

He needed a plot, without knowing the word. But there was no plot. And therein lies the deep anti-cinematographic-ness of life. Nothing but leaving home, coming back. Even

only later do we suddenly realize that the goose of the past has made her nest and laid her eggs exactly there, in the unimportant.

Here every place is formerly something else.

Happiness, besides being unattainable, is also unbearable.

Happiness, you say? Happiness is as perishable as milk left out in the sun, as a fly in winter and a crocus in early spring. Its backbone is as fragile as a seahorse’s. It’s not a sturdy mare you can jump onto and gallop far away. It’s not the cornerstone you can build your church or state upon. Happiness doesn’t make it into the history textbooks (there only battles, pogroms, betrayals, and bloody murders of some archduke make the cut), nor does it make it into the chronicles and annals. Happiness is only for primers and foreign phrase books, and for beginners, at that.