László Krasznahorkai
It lies within a writer's power to envisage and accept that if it is still at all possible to respond to the question relating to the writer's power, by the same token it is still impossible to give an answer to the real expectation inherent in the question, though maybe as yet concealed to the questioner, for the answer, which does not get to the heart of the questioner's question and that the questioner does not understand, is no answer; yet right in the middle of a troubled period of historical hopes and visions he, the questioner, would no doubt be unable to understand that an end has been reached, an end to the happy world of mutual allusiveness, an end to our linked cultures' poetic binding material, that irretrievable blend of love and a kind of sensitivity to beauty and a desire for universal discovery; and he would no doubt not understand that this binding material was already gradually starting to lose its strength from the beginning of the 20th century, as conceived in the conventional manner of the preceding century, and, in the merciless wind which was blowing from the 21st century, was starting to moulder from between the bricks of the glorious walls that gird our cities, so that this next century, the 21st, as dreamed in the 20th, would be governed by a truly brand-new (and for us frightening) fact, the idea of all-consuming growth-fixated profit of which all we notice now is that the reality of place and individuality are disappearing, and that both place and individuality are losing their original meaning insofar as we are no longer able to assert (as we were right up until the 19th century) that there is something here or there, or else (as in the 19th century) there was something, given that "according to the present state of knowledge" things were there yet not there, are here yet not here, and meanwhile the reality that had become or was becoming the past is our sole, albeit incomprehensible experience-how, then, could we explain to the questioner that the idea of an individuality that is now falling into extinction is roughly a signal that, after the final revolution in society, the part of mankind that still has the capability at all is now about to change afresh, and again what we see is that children turn to their parents in a slightly different way, and parents likewise to their children, the youngster slightly differently to the older person and the older person to the youngster, a woman differently to a man just as a man to a woman, so how should we explain to him that we are without a home, a state or sight of the world, and that in the present spiritual moment, sadly, no amount of hysterical clinging to the home, the state and the world can do anything about this, and how are we going to make the questioner understand that there is no place at all here for sadness about this, instead we must far rather nod our assent to this and that, to everything that is going to happen, with an impassive, post-Keaton expression, and suffer the undeniable bitterness accordingly like adults, in just the way that-to avail myself, briefly and by way of a farewell, of the intimate tone of a personal confession-returning home one day from I know not where, by train as it happened, between five-thirty and quarter to six on a deliberately hot and scorching summer evening, I noticed for the first time that I felt no pleasure at all over arriving back home, and since then I have been incapable of feeling pleasure over arriving back home, not that I have no desire to feel pleasure over arriving back home but (and this is what always makes me so despondent) because it is precisely on the homeward-bound journey that I am incapable of feeling pleasure over arriving back home, although in the other direction, which is to say when my movement is in the "moving away from home" direction, I don't feel any pleasure of relief or curiosity but an absolute certainty of hopelessness, because right then I am moving away from the very thing that, I suppose, I ought to be continually approaching, just as, I suppose, it would also be very hard to explain that, according to the sense of the above story, in truth we have nothing to do with the culture of the century in which we happen to be living, and meanwhile it is precisely this that is in truth impossible to comprehend with our old brains, that there is nowhere and no reason, impossible to accept that our age has not sought the fact and cause of true beauties or beautiful illusions in nature beyond mankind but has far rather explored the fact and cause of horrors, and no doubt with good reason, since in truth it lighted upon these, exclusively, so it could have searched here at least, in this larger entity, the questioner would object, but it didn't do so because it became blinded in the horror of human nature, and after all this we would fall silent, we would not in the end utter so much as a single word, just put the whole thing into words after a while, the thought that it's impossible that it is over, it has ceased, there is homelessness and statelessness everywhere, and only words are left, words for ever: about hope, about a remote belief and dignity that we can never forego.
Translated by Georg Szirtes