V E B A H O O D

Alta, Norway 2011 © Velibor Božović

I was in Norway this summer, far up in the North. Alta canyon, where I’d spent a few days, is a paradise and the whole country looks like it when observed through the airplane window. But a week after my return that fascist put the country in the news.

And then I started reading The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. The second sentence in the book, describing a scene on a Hungarian village train station, I must retype here:

“To tell the truth, none of this really surprised anyone any more since rail travel, like everything else, was subject to the prevailing conditions: all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since one could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible; which is precisely what people at the village station continued to do when, in hope of taking possession of the essentially limited seating to which they were entitled, they stormed the carriage doors, which being frozen up proved very difficult to open.”

Norway 2010 © Velibor Božović