Reality
YOII
shall forget these things, toiling in the household,
YOII
shall remember them, droning by the fire,
Wilen age and forgetflliness SI,lIeeten memory
Only like a dream that had often been told
And often been changed in the telling, They will seem unreal.
Hllman kind cannot bear lIery milch reality.
-T.
S. Eliot,
Murder in the Cathedral
There goes a fascist, Kill the fascist , Crash! Crash!
Also a coml1lllnist. Kill the commllnist. Bash! Bash!
o
reality! Holy mother!
For
YOIl
killing spiders is as little a bother,
-K.
I.
Gaiczynsk(
The sound of this word is hideous; it is a literal translation of the French
realite,
interchangeable at times with the nature of things
(Ia realite des
chases).
French distinguishes between
la realite
and
Ie reel;
Polish lacks this
distinction but needs it, Reality.
Wirklichkeit.
Russian has both
deistvi–
tel 'r/Ost
"
derived from the word for taking action, not from the word for
thing (as in Polish:
rzecz
[thing],
rzeczywistosc
[
reality]) ,and
realnost'.
What does this word mean? Why does everyone pay homage to
things? In common parlance this word refers to all things that act ac–
cording to their own laws and in such a way that, if we should find
ourselves on the track along which they are moving, we would be killed.
For we are fragile beings, and an avalanche tumbling down from the
mountains, a hurricane, bacteria, viruses, chemical changes in the cells of
our bodies can destroy us. However, we have learned to resist the forces
of nature, and although for a significant portion of mankind drought,
floods, and soil erosion are still a danger, what is left to us from among
the elemental disasters are mainly aging and such diseases as have not yet
been conquered by science. The thing which is most threatening to us is
another man, either because he is armed and we are unarmed or poorly
armed, or because (and it's all the same in the end) he has the power to
deny us money, that is, nourishment. The foundation of human society is
*Quoted from memory; it probably comes from a prewar edition of
Solomon's
Ball.
-c.
M.
