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Enero 17, 2008
I Served the King of England
Only now have I got to the core of it, what made these people beautiful was knowing that they might never see each other again. The New Man was not the victor, loud-mouthed and vain, but the man who was humble and solemn, with the beautiful eyes of a terrified animal. And so through the eyes of these lovers - because even married couples became lovers again with the danger of the front hanging over them - I learned to see the countryside, the flowers on the tables, the children at play, and to see that every hour is a sacrament.
And the unbelievable that came true stayed with me, and I believed in the unbelievable, in the star that had followed me through life, and with its gleam constantly in my eyes I began to believe in it more and more, because it had made me a millionaire, and now that I had been brought to my knees I realized that my star was brighter than ever, that only now would I be able to see its true brightness, because my eyes had been weakened by everything I had been through, weakened so that they could see more and know more.
And I talked in a jumbled way about how beauty had another side to it, about how this beautiful countryside, like a round loaf of bread, was all related to whether you could love even what was unpleasant and abandoned, whether you could love the landscape during all those hours and days and weeks when it rained, when it got dark early, when you sat by the stove and through it was ten at night while it was really only half past six, when you started talking to yourself, speaking to the horse, the dog, the cat, and the goat, but best of all to yourself, silently at first - as though showing a movie, letting images from the past flicker through your memory - and then out loud, as I had done, asking yourself questions, inquiring of yourself, interrogating yourself, wanting to know the most secret things about yourself, accusing yourself as if you were a public prosecutor and then defending yourself, and so arriving, in this back-and-forth way, at the meaning of your life.
The only right things were the things I enjoyed - not the way children or drinkers enjoyed things, but the way the professor of French literature taught me, enjoyment that was metaphysical. When you enjoy something, then you've got it, you idiots, you evil, stupid, criminal sons of men, he would say, and he'd browbeat us until he got us where he wanted us, open to poetry, to objects, to wonder, and able to see that beauty always points to infinity and eternity.
from I Served the King of England, Bohumil Hrabal
Posted by sarita at 7:43 PM