"There's no light anywhere, and nothing left to burn:"

These past few days I have been thinking a lot about ephemerality and this experience. With apologies to Mr. Brodsky there on the right, I am not so convinced that memories can be all that is left to me from these days. I lost my camera on Friday (with some 200 un-uploaded photos) and of course this is sad in its own way, but it is sadder to think that in time everything I have done here will be similarly obliterated. Already, the some 150 journal pages I've entered in the past three months are separating from the binding. Though a boy here named Eric (not to be confused with real Eric) was kind enough to point out that it just looks like I had used the journal a lot (hey), whatever positive connotations this has are nevertheless balanced out by the physical reality, the real landscape to the imagined; Marilynne Robinson: "It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall."

Nothing new, nothing new. "It's familiar, but not too familiar (and not too not-familiar)," says a songwriter I do not quote so often, for fear of drawing funny looks on the street, but he is singing about me, you know? It is all but decided that I will not be returning to Pittsburgh for any kind of living in any kind of future, and it is better this way, better to go somewhere where I can lie and lie and lie about my time in Europe, where I can use this steady deterioration of evidence to my advantage (I have had some success with this kind of dishonesty in the recent past, as some of you may know). And where there are jobs and pretty girls worth my trouble, obviously, but that must be everywhere but Pittsburgh, say?

So let's say there is nothing left to burn, then. Let's call this the last blog entry (no Prague pictures left, anyway!) and start this slow and pleasant process of forgetting. I am not one for forgetting, myself, but maybe this will be one thing left to learn here, in this city so sure of its ability to always remember.

So I got this email from the director of my program, ostensibly about "culture shock" on returning to America. Bitch please, I got all this from Leslie Pitt Abroad before I left. But there was this one part that made me laugh. Can you even imagine why?:

Family and friends may show less interest in your stories and experiences than
you expect. This may make you feel lonely, misunderstood, or unappreciated.

Less interest in my stories? Gasp! You guys are all still interested in my stories, right? I mean, you like to hear me talk about the snow-white pigeon I saw today, or how the sun reflecting off the bust of Franz Kafka in the square the bears his name actually made it look, just for a moment, a little bit like Kafka, or the boys I saw in the same square sitting on the ground drawing fantastic palaces and castles in sketchbooks...right?

i know we don't talk much, but you're such a good talker:

This morning on the tram I noticed an attractive young lady studying what appeared to be a workbook in the Czech language. "How interesting," I said to myself, "perhaps I will peek over her shoulder a bit more." Upon doing so, I found that only half of the workbook was in Czech. The other half, it turns out, was in Swedish. That's right, friends, she was teaching herself Swedish. Goodness, I don't even know what I could say to someone in that situation. "Kanske ar jag kar I dig," I suppose. Thanks, Jens.

don't mention lost coastlines, where nothing actually seen has been mapped or outlined:

Oh, I actually do have a cute little blog here, don't I? Well, not for much longer; three weeks left on the Continent. How shall I celebrate? Today I celebrated by making a pretend syllabus for a class I want to teach when I grow up. Earlier this week I made a list of all the things in life I "like" (you were all lumped into the category of "pretty girls." Yeah, even the boys.) in the hopes of, gosh let's say "mapping" them to potential jobs. My suitemate suggested this means I should be a party-planner, then asked me how my breakdown was going:

"Oh yeah, I am breaking down these interests!"
"..."
"You didn't mean that kind of breakdown, did you?"

I hope do some kind of meet & greet with the Pitt Study Abroad folks when I get back so I can explain all of these things to them. I am really good at explaining things; I left that off my list. Be right back!

"Contemplating suicide or a graduate degree:"

In my never-ending search for cheap English books in this little town, I bought myself a copy of Camus's Myth of Sisyphus. Clearly, this is exactly the kind of book I need to be reading these days. Ummm:

The important thing...is to live with one's ailments [that is, the madness stemming from the absurdity of modern life.] Kierkegaard wants to be cured. To be cured is his frenzied wish and it runs throughout his whole journal. The entire effort of his intelligence is to escape the antinomy of the human condition. An all the more desperate effort since he intermittently perceives its vanity when he speaks of himself, as if neither fear of God nor piety were capable of bringing him to peace.

And here, you thought talking about Kierkegaard was only good for getting into grad school and getting laid! Shows what you know, reader. Anyhoo, though the ostensible purpose of Camus here is to examine why suicide is not a logical reaction to K's (and everyone else who has ever thought about life, ever) dilemma, I have found it more useful for introducing me to phenomenology, the school of philosophy that I have been inadvertently practicing in this blog all semester. Imagine that - I was just going to call it "field-guiding." Now if I could only find the essential works of Edmund Husserl for less than 150 crowns, I'd be set.

Well, that and a job.

we drank champagne & danced all night under electric candlelight

Building:

Not too impressive looking, I know. So why do you suppose I would even take a picture of it? Well, as it turns out, it houses most of the National Gallery's collection of 19th & 20th century art. Oh. Wouldn't it be better to put it in this building?

For some reason, I wasn't consulted. Anyhow, I wouldn't even be bringing this up unless I wanted to talk about what's inside the building. The art? Well, not quite:

I am not 100% certain what purpose this building served in the past, but if I had to guess I suppose it would either be Ikea warehouse or Martian Embassy. The main focus of both of these pictures, by the way, is a giant glass elevator (hi, Roald Dahl!) that takes you from the ground floor all the way up to the tippy top. Most of the art I liked was somewhere in between. I had actually hoped to link you to a few of my favorites, but incredibly I could find none of them on the internet. This has made me frustrated and grumpy, resulting in this not being the ideal entry I had hoped. I can see why a lot of the paintings I liked aren't available in tiny picture form (popular = bad, duh &c) but why, for instance, can I find none of František Kupka's early paintings anywhere? He's, like, famous n'at. Goodness.

Anyway, here's a peacock:

Fun with the Czech language: I have been trying to convince my Czech teacher (hearts out to you, Lenka) of the importance of teaching my class more idioms. She has been largely compliant. "Mám opice!" translates literally as "I have a monkey," but is rather used to denote the possession of a hangover or a polite tipsy-ness (perhaps ala "I'm a little tight after this second highball," yes?). Along the same lines, we were also taught "Jsem za skolou dnes." This is literally "I'm behind school today," but actually means you are cutting class. You might be wondering about Lenka at this point. Yesterday we went for a walk and she showed us the street where one would go to (sorry!) solicit a prostitute. If it makes you feel better, we also learned the word for panda. It's "panda." But the fun part about that is that the plural is thus "pandy." Pandy, pandy, pandy. Mám rad pandy, duh.

In a related story, you won't believe what I read in Walden last night. So Thoreau is standing within a rod (hah) of an owl, right? He doesn't want to get the owl's attention, but: "[The owl] could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my feet..." !!!!!!! What next? Edgar Allen Poe describing his encounter with a "ridiculously prosh bun?" I cannot even take it.

Today, everything is different. Love is not that shy as it used to be. It's less reluctant and more impatient. One must come to peace with this. I wouldn't want somebody to think that I want to be praising the bygone days but I still must say that in our times, love used to be more beautiful because of something beautiful.
Still, I cannot claim this for sure and wouldn't want to bet my life on it.
Today, it's all quiet and empty here. Not a bird. No lovers anywhere. And yet...all of a sudden, a bit of snow fell at my feet and right after that I could hear some quiet and shy chirping in the branches. And I did meet lovers, in the end. They were walking next to each other, cuddling and silent, shrouded in the veil of their breath. Soon, they too disappeared in the enormous white silence.
I saw them again in the steamy atmosphere of one café on the Malostranské Square, where the smell of coffee mixes with cigarette smoke and the smell of wet coats. It must have been them, the two from Petřín. I recognized them well. They walked in and were blowing warm breath on their fingers. The cold is bitter.
But is it possible to hold hands with gloves on?

From "Macha's Bouquet" by Jaroslav Seifert. Not much to say about this, except that the café in question is now a Starbucks. Tak. "More beautiful because of something beautiful" is right!

Scene: Last week in my film class, we had some technical difficulties, lasting about twenty minutes. This was a good opportunity for eavesdropping, of course. A group of students were sitting around, trying to figure out just who Phillip Seymour Hoffman is. One boy knows him, and does a nice job of going through his IMDB profile:

Boy #1: He was in Capote! Have you seen that?
Boy #2: Never heard of it.
Girl #1: You guys are naming all guy movies.
Boy #1: It won an Oscar.
Boy #2: Nope, don't remember it.
Boy #1: Well, whatever. He was pretty good in it.
[Long pause]
Girl #1: What's a "capote," anyway?

Fin.