Sul Campo Del Mare - Vilenica

V2-2010.PM51746/13/100, 12:14 PMViktória Radicsdestiny. Reading has brought me this far: In books, there are no answersto the burning questions”.So that’s how it is. Reading can’t help you to lead a good life, to stayalive or to find answers to the existential questions. Not that I would denythe cognitive function or the cathartic role of literature. But it lacks thecreative or beautifying effect that the early followers of the Gutenberggalaxy crowned it with in the era of the Renaissance. Nor the salvationalcharacter with which the early Romantic scholars exalted it. And it doesn’tchange our lives or our world as the modernists and avant-gardists believed.Márai, one of the greatest readers, wrote on Christmas 1985 whenLola was dying that “there are no ‘words’”, life is senseless and merciless,in the end, we burn out. “We come from nothing and disappear into nothing;everything else is childhood fantasy. What happens in-between issometimes wonderful but always senseless and pointless”.Reading is nothing but perception and the esthetic pleasure of pointlessnessand senselessness, the illumination of great failure and perhapssometimes joyful self-torture. ‘Atopos’, the non-spatial, ethereal place orcircle in the mind, where Freudian instincts of life and death embrace intheir strange beauty. Something that demanded the writer’s hard workbrings me pleasure for a brief moment. This indicates as well, in nonscientificterms, that the basic structure of life is that of sadomasochism.My apartment lies in ruins, my brain in pieces, I am a nervous wreck. Ifyou saw me now, you would be afraid. I have done nothing in my wholelife but read. Each day, I have found at least one good sentence, at leastone unfinished sentence. My life is no easier because of that – but licketysplit– I grab a book, turn a few pages and I am gone, goodbye!Translated from the Slovene by Ana Jasmina Oseban174