This is the Grave of Bohumil Hrabal
This is the grave of Bohumil Hrabal, who wrote, “Wandering through the streets of Prague, I switched on my X-ray eyes and peered down through transparent pavements into the sewers to find rodent general staffs mapping out operations for rodent troops, generals barking orders into their walkie-talkies about which front to put pressure on, but I just kept walking, listening to the crunch of sharp little rats’ teeth under my shoes and thinking of the melancholy of a world eternally under construction, and when I looked up through my tears I noticed something I had never noticed before, namely, that the facades, the fronts of all the buildings, public and residential—and I could see them all the way up to the drainpipes—were a reflection of everything Hegel and Goethe had dreamed of and aspired to, the Greece in us, the beautiful Hellenic model and goal.”
Hrabal died after falling out of a fifth-floor hospital window. People have various ideas about that—about whether he meant to or not, to be blunt—but it doesn’t matter very much to me. There were seeds on the ledge; he had seeds in his hands. Whatever else is true, he’d been feeding pigeons.
Brand New Monster
LCA Flickr
One Comment
Leave it to the Poles to do a headstone like that! Now why did we leave that winter weather on the Rinek?
Nice site you have.
dw
Your Name
12/6/2010
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