Time Shelter

by Georgi Gospodinov

When does the everyday become history?

For a Bulgarian, complaining is like talking about the weather in England, you can never go wrong.

He passed away happy, it seems to me, in one of his favorite memories,

The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back. And not for happy reasons, by the way. We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. Call it the time shelter, if you will.

The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined.

Happened stories are all alike, every unhappened story is unhappened in its own way.

Everything is in the light. I know from photographers that afternoon light is the most suitable of exposures. Morning light is too young, too sharp. Afternoon light is old light, tired and slow.

He has no friends, no living relatives. No one to call. If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all?

if no one remembers, then everything is permissible.

Actually, our bodies turn out to be quite merciful by nature, a little amnesia rather than anesthesia at the end. Our memory, which is leaving us, lets us play a bit longer, one last time in the Elysian fields of childhood. A few well-begged-for, please-just-five-more minutes, like in the old days, playing outside in the street. Before we get called home for good.

Clearly the price of life has fallen, while everything else has gone up.

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

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

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.

Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future.