going to the movies.
Yes, she thought of herself as "serious" and associated this quality with going to the movies. Her favorites were the war films so prevalent at the time, perhaps because they were exciting, but more likely because the unmitigated suffering in them filled her with feelings of pity and sadness she found uplifting and indicative of the "serious" part of herself she prized so highly.
But it would not be accurate to say that I was attracted to Lucie only by the exoticism of her simplicity. Her simplicity, the gaps in her education, did not prevent her from understanding me. This understanding consisted not in experience or knowledge, or in the ability to argue and advise,, but in the receptiveness with which she listened to me.
I remember one summer day: my leave happened to begin before Lucie's shift was over; I had taken a book along, and I sat down on a garden wall to read; I'd been having trouble keeping up with my reading: there was so little time, and communications with my Prague friends were poor; but I'd packed three small books of poetry into my bag, and I read them over and over for the comfort they brought me: they were poems by Frantisek Halas.
Those three books played a strange role in my life, strange if only because I am not a great poetry-lover and they were the only books of poetry I ever really cared for. I discovered them just after I'd been expelled from the Party, during the period when Halas's name was coming back into the public eye: the leading ideologue of the time accused the recently deceased poet of morbidity, skepticism, existentialism, of everything that smacked of political anathema in those days. (The book in which he set forth his views on Czech poetry in general and Halas in particular came out in an enormous printing and was required reading in all Czech schools.)
In times of distress man seeks comfort by linking his grief with the grief of others; laughable as it may sound, I confess that the reason I sought out Halas's verse was that I wanted to commune with someone else who had been excommunicated; I wanted to find out whether my own mentality had any similarity to the mentality of a recognized apostate; and I wanted to test whether the grief the powerful ideologue had proclaimed pernicious and cankered might not, in consonance with my own, procure for me a kind of joy (for in my situation, I could scarcely have been expected to find joy in joy). Before leaving for Ostrava, I borrowed the three books from a former fellow student, a lover of literature, and then begged until he agreed not to ask for them back.
When Lucie found me at the appointed place with a book in my hand, she asked me what I was reading. I showed her the pages it was open to. "Poetry!" she said in amazement.
"Do you find it strange for
me to be reading poetry?" She shrugged her shoulders and said, "No, why should it be?"
But I think she did, because in all probability she identified poetry with children's books.
We wandered through Ostrava's odd sooty summer, a black summer of coal cars rumbling along overhead cables instead of fleecy clouds scudding across the sky. I noticed that Lucie still seemed drawn to the book, and when we found a small grove and sat down, I opened it and asked, "Are you interested?" She nodded.
I'd never recited poetry to anyone before; I've never done it since. I have a highly sensitive mechanism, a circuit breaker of reticence, that keeps me from opening up too far, from revealing my feelings; and reciting verse seems to me more than just talking about my feelings, it is as if I were standing on one leg at the same time; a certain unnatural-ness in the very principle of rhythm and rhyme embarrasses me when I think of indulging in it in anything but solitude.
But Lucie had the magical power (no one after her has ever had it) to bypass the circuit breaker and rid me of the burden of my shyness. In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos. And
Yes, she thought of herself as "serious" and associated this quality with going to the movies. Her favorites were the war films so prevalent at the time, perhaps because they were exciting, but more likely because the unmitigated suffering in them filled her with feelings of pity and sadness she found uplifting and indicative of the "serious" part of herself she prized so highly.
But it would not be accurate to say that I was attracted to Lucie only by the exoticism of her simplicity. Her simplicity, the gaps in her education, did not prevent her from understanding me. This understanding consisted not in experience or knowledge, or in the ability to argue and advise,, but in the receptiveness with which she listened to me.
I remember one summer day: my leave happened to begin before Lucie's shift was over; I had taken a book along, and I sat down on a garden wall to read; I'd been having trouble keeping up with my reading: there was so little time, and communications with my Prague friends were poor; but I'd packed three small books of poetry into my bag, and I read them over and over for the comfort they brought me: they were poems by Frantisek Halas.
Those three books played a strange role in my life, strange if only because I am not a great poetry-lover and they were the only books of poetry I ever really cared for. I discovered them just after I'd been expelled from the Party, during the period when Halas's name was coming back into the public eye: the leading ideologue of the time accused the recently deceased poet of morbidity, skepticism, existentialism, of everything that smacked of political anathema in those days. (The book in which he set forth his views on Czech poetry in general and Halas in particular came out in an enormous printing and was required reading in all Czech schools.)
In times of distress man seeks comfort by linking his grief with the grief of others; laughable as it may sound, I confess that the reason I sought out Halas's verse was that I wanted to commune with someone else who had been excommunicated; I wanted to find out whether my own mentality had any similarity to the mentality of a recognized apostate; and I wanted to test whether the grief the powerful ideologue had proclaimed pernicious and cankered might not, in consonance with my own, procure for me a kind of joy (for in my situation, I could scarcely have been expected to find joy in joy). Before leaving for Ostrava, I borrowed the three books from a former fellow student, a lover of literature, and then begged until he agreed not to ask for them back.
When Lucie found me at the appointed place with a book in my hand, she asked me what I was reading. I showed her the pages it was open to. "Poetry!" she said in amazement.
"Do you find it strange for
me to be reading poetry?" She shrugged her shoulders and said, "No, why should it be?"
But I think she did, because in all probability she identified poetry with children's books.
We wandered through Ostrava's odd sooty summer, a black summer of coal cars rumbling along overhead cables instead of fleecy clouds scudding across the sky. I noticed that Lucie still seemed drawn to the book, and when we found a small grove and sat down, I opened it and asked, "Are you interested?" She nodded.
I'd never recited poetry to anyone before; I've never done it since. I have a highly sensitive mechanism, a circuit breaker of reticence, that keeps me from opening up too far, from revealing my feelings; and reciting verse seems to me more than just talking about my feelings, it is as if I were standing on one leg at the same time; a certain unnatural-ness in the very principle of rhythm and rhyme embarrasses me when I think of indulging in it in anything but solitude.
But Lucie had the magical power (no one after her has ever had it) to bypass the circuit breaker and rid me of the burden of my shyness. In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos. And
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