#love and garbage

[coffeecatcalliope]

Ivan Klíma, Love and Garbage

[sotoomuch]

"Don't worry, the soul doesn't perish, somehow it lives on.

In another body?

Why in a body at all? I see your soul as a pillar. It looks stony but it's made of fire and wind. And it towers so high that from down on the ground you can't see the top of it. And up there it is smiling.

That pillar?

Your soul, darling. Because you have a smile inside you, even if you think you've only got grief, and that's why I feel good with you."

Ivan Klima, Love and Garbage

[sotoomuch]

"Perhaps just that is the essence or the meaning of writing: we speak about our most personal concerns in a language which turns equally to human beings as to someone who is above us and who, in some echo or reflection, also resides within us. If a person does not glimpse or hear within himself something that surpasses him, that has cosmic depth, then language will not make him respond anyway."

Ivan Klima, Love and Garbage

[sotoomuch]

How can a person win love if he can't come to a decision? - Ivan Klima, Love and Garbage

[sotoomuch]

"As he grew older his litanies became an unchanging prayer which I knew by heart and to which I no longer had to listen. And then one night I awoke. Everyone else was sleeping, and from the corner of the room where grandfather slept I could hear a strange muttering. I recognised the old man's voice and the plaintive intonation of a prayer spoken in the language he still knew but of which I no longer understood anything, a prayer addressed to God. I did not stir and listened with amazement to the voice which seemed to come from a great distance, from some long-past time. That was the first time I realised that the depth of the human soul is unfathomable."

Ivan Klima, Love and Garbage

[sotoomuch]

"The next day I collected her and took her to meet my friends; none of them would have hurt her and there was no need for me to protect her against them - but I realised that she saw things differently, that she needed my presence, that with me she felt safer. [...] We were never alone together, away from the company of our playmates, but I always tried to get as close to her as possible. We also lent each other the few books we owned, but we dared not go any further, I dared not go any further; and yet everything was suddenly changed, life was moving between different milestones, no longer from morning to evening or from meal to meal, but from meeting to meeting. The fortress ran out of salt, the potatoes were black and rotten and the bread was mouldy, but I didn't care; they took grandfather to the camp hospital and we guessed that he'd never come back, but I scarcely took it in. The fortress corridors, always so overcrowded, seemed empty when she walked alongside me, and the tiny space allotted to us grew wide, or rather it was enclosed in itself and thus became infinite."

Ivan Klima, Love and Garbage

[sotoomuch]

"I'd sit at my table and listen to the silence which was swallowing me up. I could hear nothing but a barely perceptible individual snapping sound as some of the individual threads broke, and I longed to discover some hope I could attach myself to. That was when she appeared. If we had met at some other time we'd probably have passed each other by, but at just that moment I raced after her like a man drugged, and it took years for me to come to again. At the same time I never stopped conducting a silent argument with her. Even when I longed for her most my words died in my throat the moment she looked at me, whenever the night separated me from her embracing and comforting glance I would compose answers to questions, reproaches, wishes and yearnings which until then I had left unanswered.

And now, as the night lazily stretched its back over me, I was continuing, by force of habit, with the silent letter in which I had defended myself and tried to prove that I didn't want to hurt her. Before throwing it into the big box full of unsent letters and wishes, full of promises, requests and half-whispered hopes I tried once more to visualise what she was doing just then, at least to visualise her room. Who knows if she was even there. I no longer knew how she spent her nights. Maybe she was just returning home, her swift footsteps were closing the circle. If I got up now and ran after her, maybe I could cut the circle open, clutch her to myself, within the confines of that circle forget everything outside of it, everything that was, that is, and that would inevitably be. But I knew I wouldn't do it. I'd only get up in the morning to set off for the streets I'd decided to sweep clean. It suddenly occurred to me that this was the reason why I'd found myself in the street with a handcart yesterday morning. I needed to go somewhere in the morning, at least I'd now have a natural objective for a while: set out somewhere, preform whatever kind of activity and listen to whatever kind of talk, just so I don't have to sit amidst the silence listening to the snapping of the threads."

Ivan Klima, Love and Garbage

[sotoomuch]

"What depressed me were certainly not doubts about the rightness of my choice, but the knowledge that I'd made the decision once and for all. I suspected that for me the most blissful prospect was not so much having the person I loved permanently by my side as a need, from time to time, to reach out to emptiness, to let longing intensify within me to the point of agony, to alternate the pain of separation with the relief of renewed coming together, the chance of escape and return, of glimpsing before me a will-o'-the-wisp, the hope that the real encounter was still awaiting me.

Man is reluctant to accept that his life has come to a conclusion in that most important respect, that his hopes have been fulfilled. He hesitates to look death in the face, and there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love."

Ivan Klima, Love and Garbage