Franco-Czechoslovak poet and novelist (1929—2023)
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He looked at her and tried to discover behind her lascivious expression the familiar features that he loved tenderly. It was as if he were looking at two images through the same lens, at two images superimposed one on the other with one showing through the other. These two images showing through each other were telling him that everything was in the girl, that her soul was terrifyingly amorphous, that it held faithfulness and unfaithfulness, treachery and innocence, flirtatiousness and chastity. This disorderly jumble seemed disgusting to him, like the variety to be found in a pile of garbage. Both images continued to show through each other, and the young man understood that the girl differed only on the surface from other women, but deep down was the same as they: full of all possible thoughts, feelings, and vices, which justified all his secret misgivings and fits of jealousy. The impression that certain outlines delineated her as an individual was only a delusion to which the other person, the one who was looking, was subject — namely himself. It seemed to him that the girl he loved was a creation of his desire, his thoughts, and his faith and that the real girl now standing in front of him was hopelessly other, hopelessly alien, hopelessly ambiguous. He hated her.
Children, you are the future,' he said, and today I realize he did not mean it the way it sounded. The reason children are the future is not that they will one day be grownups. No, the reason is that mankind is moving more and more in the direction of infancy, and childhood is the image of the future.
That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles.
الحب بالتعريف هو هدية غير مشروطة، أن تكون محبوباً بدون اشتراط لهو البرهان على الحب الحقيقي. لو أخبرتني امرأة: أنا أحبك لأنك ذكي، لأنك لائق، لأنك تبتاع لي الهدايا، لأنك لا تلاحق النساء، لأنك تغسل الأطباق.. حينها سأكون في خيبة أمل، فهكذا حب - في الواقع - هو مشروع مصلحة ذاتية. كم هو أكثر دقة أن نسمع: أنا مجنونة بك ولو لم تكن ذكياً أو لائقاً، حتى ولو كنت كاذباً أو مغروراً أو مجرد لقيط!