above us all, in a cloud of incense, the eagle of St. John the Evangelist. I showed him the smocks of the local craftsmen, just as blue as those of the cottagers back home, the shopping bags of the older women, dangling from the crook of their arms on long handles, the pocket knives with wooden grips, so similar to our penknives back home, the numerous blank windows in the houses along the bay, even a hillside with ancient cow paths.
Yet Filip Kobal, after all the days we had spent hiking together, after he had remarked briefly that the region here was exceptionally lively and varied, and that anyone could see I knew my way around like a taxi driver, geographer, and forester all in oneâwhy else would the many people who got lost here instinctively turn to me and receive reliable directionsâFilip Kobal said I had spent enough time away from home now. For a long while I had represented a standard for him. As long as I had stuck it out, as his fellow countryman, in writing and also in life, that had given him and a few others the strength to carry on, he would assert. But in the meantime my example was no longer valid. Of course, he himself repeatedly left our country and its people. I, however, had overstayed my time abroad, and it was henceforth inconceivable that he should read my admittedly very original and special writings as before. Of course, he saw the similarities between this place and the region from which we both came, precisely through the differences, but a spiral staircase in Sevres could never be âmyâ or âtheâ spiral staircase, something characteristic, something for a book. With all due respect to the pear tree in my yard, likewise to the even older cherry tree, to the neighbors, to the bar acquaintances, to the cattails, bullfrogs, snakes, and otters in the forest ponds, to the air base, the atomic plant, the secret vineyards, the tangle of vines above the brook known only to me: when described, woven into a narrative by me, one who had come of his own volition, they amounted in his eyes to nothing but interference in othersâ business, the opposite of a well-founded bookâsomething superfluous, and with all those plane trees, cedars, bamboo stalks, even fig trees and palms, to boot.
And abruptly, as Kobal was lecturing me, he seized me around the
midsection, hoisted me in the air, and continued to speak, thus: âItâs true, in the course of these days youâve let me see, without pointing it out, always only in passing, the Easter fungus on the tree trunks just like that at home, the moss in the ravines, the almost identical rural railroad station, the woman with the washboard, the cassis or currant bushes deep in the woods, the bus station like Klagenfurtâs, the wooden balcony with red geraniums like Kobaridâs, the root cellar like the one behind my familyâs house in Rinkenberg. But it isnât here. This here is a substitute. The originals are somewhere else and have been waiting for you a long, long time. What do I care if you keep a journal on the landscape and the people here, even a chronicle? Even if you sit out and walk out another twenty years here, nothing will acquire mythic depth for you. And the mythic dimension, the earth-fissure world, was your specialty, from the beginning. Without the mythic dimension your books are certainly more manageable, less circumstantial. But they arenât really yours, donât really yield a proper book. And donât tell me youâre on the trail of the mythic world of the Ile de France just because you know the appropriate story to tell when we get to the âCrossroads of the Woman Without a Headâ in the forest of Meudon, and likewise at the âCrossroads of the Broken Manâ on the other wooded hill, which is called the âForest of False Rest,â and likewise in the forest two hills farther on, called the âForest of the Hanged Wolf.â Though the original
Yet Filip Kobal, after all the days we had spent hiking together, after he had remarked briefly that the region here was exceptionally lively and varied, and that anyone could see I knew my way around like a taxi driver, geographer, and forester all in oneâwhy else would the many people who got lost here instinctively turn to me and receive reliable directionsâFilip Kobal said I had spent enough time away from home now. For a long while I had represented a standard for him. As long as I had stuck it out, as his fellow countryman, in writing and also in life, that had given him and a few others the strength to carry on, he would assert. But in the meantime my example was no longer valid. Of course, he himself repeatedly left our country and its people. I, however, had overstayed my time abroad, and it was henceforth inconceivable that he should read my admittedly very original and special writings as before. Of course, he saw the similarities between this place and the region from which we both came, precisely through the differences, but a spiral staircase in Sevres could never be âmyâ or âtheâ spiral staircase, something characteristic, something for a book. With all due respect to the pear tree in my yard, likewise to the even older cherry tree, to the neighbors, to the bar acquaintances, to the cattails, bullfrogs, snakes, and otters in the forest ponds, to the air base, the atomic plant, the secret vineyards, the tangle of vines above the brook known only to me: when described, woven into a narrative by me, one who had come of his own volition, they amounted in his eyes to nothing but interference in othersâ business, the opposite of a well-founded bookâsomething superfluous, and with all those plane trees, cedars, bamboo stalks, even fig trees and palms, to boot.
And abruptly, as Kobal was lecturing me, he seized me around the
midsection, hoisted me in the air, and continued to speak, thus: âItâs true, in the course of these days youâve let me see, without pointing it out, always only in passing, the Easter fungus on the tree trunks just like that at home, the moss in the ravines, the almost identical rural railroad station, the woman with the washboard, the cassis or currant bushes deep in the woods, the bus station like Klagenfurtâs, the wooden balcony with red geraniums like Kobaridâs, the root cellar like the one behind my familyâs house in Rinkenberg. But it isnât here. This here is a substitute. The originals are somewhere else and have been waiting for you a long, long time. What do I care if you keep a journal on the landscape and the people here, even a chronicle? Even if you sit out and walk out another twenty years here, nothing will acquire mythic depth for you. And the mythic dimension, the earth-fissure world, was your specialty, from the beginning. Without the mythic dimension your books are certainly more manageable, less circumstantial. But they arenât really yours, donât really yield a proper book. And donât tell me youâre on the trail of the mythic world of the Ile de France just because you know the appropriate story to tell when we get to the âCrossroads of the Woman Without a Headâ in the forest of Meudon, and likewise at the âCrossroads of the Broken Manâ on the other wooded hill, which is called the âForest of False Rest,â and likewise in the forest two hills farther on, called the âForest of the Hanged Wolf.â Though the original
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