ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
43
cells, red and white corpuscles, bacteria and viruses, glands and muscles. I
like to think about my great imperial body, rinsed by oceans, veiled in
winter by merciful snow, defended by freckled soldiers. I often imagine
the small towns being nothing more than magnified villages (train sta–
tion; long, narrow almost rushing street planted with scrawny linden
trees; two bakeries; a hairdresser; and finally a town square with its fork
of a monument, sticking up tentatively in the very center of the square);
I have never set foot there, yet I am present there and strongly so - in
portraits, posters, decrees, even in dreams.
There are good thoughts and bad thoughts. Sometimes unpleasant,
malicious things reach my ears. One hears accusations. The universal love
which, until not too long ago, bound us warmly and tightly is coming
apart at the seams. One hears accusations, usually about two decades late.
One hears that we murdered, that we were cruel. And who says this?
People who have stopped believing in the immortal soul. They are ap–
palled by killing because they do not believe in the existence of the im–
mortal soul.
Yes, we killed. Please think about the sort of life they oppose to
death. What exactly were we depriving our victims, our opponents of,
what sort of life? A lazy, sedentary, vegetative one.
Can someone who tears though a cobweb in a forest, only because
that someone is running, be accused of a crime? What exactly did we
destroy? Life? What is it, if it does not grow into one with us, if it does
not join us, if it does not increase its velocity, movement? (We are
movement.)
Do you remember Dickens's novels? The small, greedy people in
Dickens, monstrous characters, the monsters of suburban households,
pitiless shopkeepers, gluttonous old men, cruel, heartless men and
women?
Do you remember Dickens's novels? Inscrutable, dark life, fulsome
hatreds, suffering, disgrace. The little streets of London, the labyrinth in
which innocent children perished every day. Do you remember the illus–
trations in the Dickens' novels? Hooknoses, dullwitted faces, stupid, or–
dinary snouts. So much evil, so much baseness, which also carried itself
with such dignity, walked in glory, in the bourgeois praise of virtue. Do
you recall the helplessness of the small heroes in Dickens, heroes con–
demned to a hopeless struggle against the tyrants of family, school,
parish, shop? Life? That was your life: dirty, slovenly, life deprived of
splendor in the alleys of great cities. The gold coin shone more brightly
there than the flames of hell and was more desired than salvation.
And perhaps you have read Leon Bloy? Oh no, I will not refer you
to our writers, witnesses from the other side will suffice . Do you remem–
ber what Leon Bloy wrote about property owners, about the saleslady
