KRASZNAHORKAI, László

Satantango

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They're dead, all of them," the doctor wrote. "Or they're sitting at the kitchen table leaning on their elbows. Not even a broken door and window can rouse the headmaster. Come winter he'll freeze his ass off." Suddenly he sat up straight up in his chair as a new thought dawned on him. He raised his head and stared at the ceiling, gasping for breath, then gripped his pencil... "Now he is standing up", he wrote in a deepning reverie, pressing the pencil lightly in case he tore the paper. "He scratched his groin and stretched. He walks around the room and sits down again. He goes out for a piss and returns. Sits down. Stands up." He scribbled feverishly and was practically seeing everything that was happening over there, and he knew, was deadly certain, that from then on this was how it would be. He realized that all those years of arduous, painstaking work had finally borne fruit: he had become the master of a singular art that enabled him not only to describe a world whose eternal unremitting progress in one direction required such mastery but also- to certain extent- he could even intervene in the mechanism behind an apparently chaotic swirl of events!

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The Melancholy of Resistance

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“To be more accurate, Eszter continued, it was only a shadow in the mirror, a mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincided though the shadow nevertheless tried to separate them, to separate two things that had from eternity been the same and could not be separated or cut into two, thereby losing the weightless delight of being swept along with it, substituting, he thought as he stepped away from the drawing-room window, a solid eternity purchased with knowledge for the sweet song of participating in eternity, a song so airy it was lighter than a feather.”

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