Little green man running…
…And little red man standing. On Sunday I listened to an old friend, now also old in years, telling me of the time in 1938 stood on the railway platform of the city of Bratislava watching the surrounding roads filled with the streams of people-filled cars and other vehicles travelling east from Vienna towards the (then) safety of Checkoslovakia.
Here is the transcript of the letter I wrote to the friend today:
It is a nice coincidence to be lending you the
book of Selected Poems by Czeslaw Milosz, and then to come across this latest
piece by Tony Judt (dated 13th July 2010 in the NYRB Blog). Krasnogruda!
“I prefer the edge” (in Edge People Tony
Judt NYRB 25/0310) followed by a colon and then his description of the place,
first singular, then plural. I prefer the edge too, which for me in the end is
always best described as a city. Or a part of a city. For instance I quite
frequently find myself writing, and quite extensively in a kind of fictive
reconstruction, about Alexanderplatz in Berlin. I have only been there once,
for 24 hours in November 2008, but it often comes back to mind, especially
through the words I read there on a large building site sign opposite the hotel
we were staying in, and then wrote down – mit traumhaften aussichten.
Or several cities together at the same time,
such as Berlin, Amsterdam and London, and other cities I have not yet visited,
like Buenos Aires, Calcutta or Kyev, and perhaps never will. The cities appear
to me in some form of fluid relationship together not unlike a mercurial
electronic airport Departures board with its lists of destinations, times of
flight, and remarks – the remarks always brief and fragmentary, like the sign mit
traumhaften aussichten – my task being to listen (or read) and write them down,
and then return later to try to make sense of them.
Thank
you especially for the connection, or better put the re-connection with Tony
Judt who I first came across through his book ‘Postwar’ about two years ago. A few years older than me and
now ill with AML for which there is no cure, there is both a deep sadness and
an urgent quality in his writing, and hope, an authentic hopefulness that does
not rely on belief. Somewhere else on the NYRB website I saw Judt writing of
the not knowing of the meaning of death, or rather of the experience of a
meaning that is known, but it is withheld from consciousness. I can’t find the
reference now, but I remember he gave the German word for this exact moment.
Perhaps you know it.
Or perhaps somebody else reading this knows the German word, and will tell me what it is.