Thursday, January 11, 2018

I got the biggest pear I've ever seen as a gift at work

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

According to my calculations there are two or three new fictional characters baptized on earth every second. As a result, I am always unsure of myself when it comes time for me to enter that vast crowd of John the Baptists. But what can I do? I have to call my characters something, don't I? Well, this time, just to make it clear my heroine belongs to me and me alone (and means more to me than anyone ever has), I am giving her a name no woman has ever had before: Tamina. I picture her as tall and beautiful, thirty-three, and a native of Prague.
     I can see her now, walking down a street in a provincial town in the west of Europe. Yes, you're right. Prague, which is far away, I call by its name, while the town my story takes place in I leave anonymous. It goes against all rules of perspective, but you'll just have to put up with it.
     Tamina has a job as a waitress in a small café belonging to a married couple. The café brought in so little money the husband took a job somewhere else and they hired Tamina to take his place. The difference between the miserable salary he earned at his new job and the even more miserable salary they gave Tamina was their only profit...
    All she has left of her husband is his passport picture. The other pictures remain behind in their appropriated apartment in Prague. Every day she looks at the grimy, dog-eared picture showing her husband full face (like a criminal in a mug shot). It is not a good likeness. Every day she spends some time in a sort of spiritual exercise, trying to remember what he looked like in profile, then half profile, then quarter profile, going over the lines of his nose and chin, and every day she is horrified at new fuzzy spots where her memory hesitates about which way to go.
     During these exercises she tried to evoke his skin, its color, and all its minor blemishes: tiny warts, protuberances, freckles, veins. It was difficult, almost impossible. The colors her memory used were unrealistic. They could not do justice to human skin. As a result, she developed her own special technique of calling him to mind. Whenever she sat across from a man, she would use his head as a kind of sculptor's armature. She would concentrate all her attention on him and remodel his face inside her head, darkening the complexion, adding freckles and warts, scaling down the ears...
    Why do I picture her with a golden ring in her mouth?
M. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Od 2009, narednih sedam godina mnogo sam sanjala jednu osobu, dva sna drzim u secanju, prvi, kada smo se, bezeci od vlasti jednog totalitarnog sistema u dalekoj buducnosti, koji nam je branio da budemo zajedno, spustali tunelima u obliku tobogana, drzeci se za ruke i drugi, kada sam ga, stigavsi u njegov grad, cekala u njegovoj sobi i videla meni poznatu odecu koju nosi i mogla da je dodirnem I kada se pojavio na vratima, tiho sam rekla: "Ne plasi se, ja sam unutra." Oba su snova imala radnju dovoljno dugu za dve kratke price. Stalno sam imala nevolje s telefonom jer me bilo zao da uklonim stare poruke.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Leaves coming through the windows into rooms and constant sound of Overground trains make the house perfect

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Saturday, July 1, 2017

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_in_the_Dunes
The woman brought in the meal: clam soup with boiled fish. Very much a shore meal, it seemed. That was all right but as he began to eat she opened a large paper umbrella and put it over him.
“What’s that thing for?” He wondered if it were some kind of custom of the region.
“Well, if I don’t put this up, the sand will get in your food.”
“How is that?” he said, looking up in surprise at the ceiling, where, however, there were no holes at all.
She followed his eyes to the ceiling.”The sand sits in everywhere. Almost an inch piles up if I don’t sweep it up every day.”
“Is the roof faulty?”
“Yes, pretty much so. But even if the thatching was brand-new, the sand would sift in anyway. It’s really terrible. It’s worse than a wood borer.”
“A wood borer?”
“An insect that eats holes in wood.”
“That’s probably a termite, isn’t it?”
“No, no. It’s about this big… with a hard skin.”
“Ah. Well, it’s a long-horned saw beetle then.”
“A saw beetle?”
“Long whiskers and reddish, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s sort of bronze-colored and shaped like a grain of rice.”
“I see. Then it’s an iridescent beetle.”
“If you let it go on beams like these rot away to nothing, you know.”
“You mean the iridescent beetle?”
“No, the sand.”
“Why?”
“It gets in from from everywhere. On days when the wind direction is bad, it gets up under the roof, and if I didn’t sweep it away it would soon pile up so heavy that the ceiling boards wouldn’t hold it.”
“Hmm. yes, I can see it wouldn’t do to let the sand accumulate in the ceiling. But isn’t it funny to say that it rots the beams?”
“No, they do rot.”
“But sand is essentially dry, you know.”
“Anyway, it rots them. If you leave sand on brand-new wooden clogs they fall apart in half a month. they’re just dissolved, they say, so it must be true.”
“I don’t understand the reason.”
“Wood rots, and the sand rots with it. I even heard that soil rich enough to grow cucumbers came out of the roof boards of a house that had been buried under the sand.”
“Impossible, he exclaimed rudely, making a wry face. He felt that his own personal concept of sand has been defiled by her ignorance.”I know a little about sand myself. Let me tell you. Sand moves around like this all year long. Its flow is its life. It absolutely never stops-anywhere. Whether in water or air, it moves about free and unrestricted. So, usually, ordinary living things are unable to endure life in it, and this goes for bacteria too. How shall I put it… sand represents purity, cleanliness. Maybe it serves a preservative function, but there is certainly no question of its rotting anything. And, what’s more, dear lady, to begin with, sand is a respectable mineral. It couldn’t possibly rot away.”
She stiffened and fell silent. Under the protection of the umbrella which she was holding, the man, as if hurried, finished eating without a word. On the surface of the umbrella so much sand has collected he could have written in it with his finger.


The sky was heavy with stars.

( The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe)

Thursday, June 22, 2017


This tree always reminds me of him. With all the things happening around me, I feel guilty about having any funny thought or happy moment.









Tuesday, June 13, 2017

"Every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other"

Sunday, June 11, 2017

my camera is on the way to meet me

R. Tagore, Come As You Are


Come as you are; do not loiter over
your toilet.
 If your braided hair has loosened if
the parting of your hair be not straight,
if the ribbons of your bodice be not
fastened, do not mind.
 Come as you are; do not loiter over
your toilet.
 Come, with quick steps over the
grass.
 If the raddle come from your feet
because of the dew, of the rings of bells
upon your feet slacken, if pearls drop
out of your chain, do not mind.
 Come, with quick steps over the
grass.
 Do you see the clouds wrapping the
sky?
 Flocks of cranes fly up from the
further river-bank and fitful gusts of
wind rush over the heath.
 The anxious cattle run to their stalls
in the village.
 Do you see the clouds wrapping the
sky?
 In vain you light your toilet lamp
--it flickers and goes out in the
wind.
 Who can know that your eyelids
have not been touched with lamp-
black? For your eyes are darker
than rain-clouds.
 In vain you light your toilet lamp--
it goes out.
 Come as you are; do not loiter over
your toilet.
 If the wreath is not woven, who
cares; if the wrist-chain had not been
linked, let it be.
 The sky is overcast with clouds--it
is late.
 Come as you are; do not loiter over
your toilet.
Ivan Ivanych came out of the cabin, dived in with a loud splash and swam in the rain, making broad sweeps with his arms and sending out waves with white lilies bobbing about on them. He swam right out to the middle of the reach and dived. A moment later he popped up somewhere else and swam on, continually trying to dive right to the bottom.
'Oh, good God,' he kept saying with great relish. 'Good God...'
He reached the mill, said a few words to the peasants, then he turned and floated on his back in the middle with his face under the rain. Burkin and Alyokhin were already dressed and ready to leave, but he kept on swimming and diving.
'Oh, dear God,' he said. 'Oh, God!'
'Now that's enough,' Burkin shouted.


(Gooseberries, A. Chekhov)

Tuesday, June 6, 2017