Time Shelter

by Georgi Gospodinov

(although I continue to believe that memories are passed down directly from parent to child—your parents’ memories become your own). The

Monsters still do exist, however. There is one monster that stalks every one of us. Death, you’ll say, yes, of course, death is his brother, but old age is the monster.

But what happens when you no longer have the strength to kill yourself, and not just strength but you no longer even remember how to do it?

How ironic—the Anthropocene, the first era named for man, will likely turn out to be the last for him.

In fact, the first thing that goes in memory loss is the very concept of the future.

When you have no future, you vote for the past.

no longer remember who said that a nation was a group of people who have agreed to jointly remember and forget the same things.

People believe that no matter what happens, the inviolable consolation of nature will remain. There will always be spring, summer, and fall, replaced by winter and then in turn by spring. But even this is not guaranteed. Incidentally, according to the Celts, one of the first signs of the apocalypse is the mixing of the seasons.

Forgetting takes a lot of work. You have to constantly remember that you are supposed to forget something. Surely that’s how every ideology functions.

Happy countries are all alike; each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way, as has been written.

(A doctor had told him that hearing loss and memory loss were related, they shared the same room in the brain.)

Why is the past so dangerous, and why is looking back at it such a sin that you will be turned into a pillar of salt? The apocalypse comes precisely to destroy the past.

Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you.

a brave and inconsolable book, would be one in which all stories, the happened and the unhappened, float around us in the primordial chaos, shouting and whispering, begging and sniggering, meeting and passing one another by in the darkness.