Day Forty-one, in Which the Háje Paneláky Are Visited

About sixty years ago, the Czechoslovak government's urban planners came together in what I imagine to be a cacophonous goulash of adderall and ideology and produced the sort of idea that normally comes from, well, communist urban planners. This idea was to make as many citizens as humanly possible live in as few structures as possible. For, you know, solidarity. This led to the panelák, a dense, concrete monolith teeming with inhabitants crammed between its paper-thin walls. Built in monotonous clusters, the resultant panelák communities often saw tens of thousands of people living on one block. One of the most notorious panelák communities is Háje, an insular grouping of paneláky clinging to the gaunt outskirts of Prague. It lies at the very end of Prague's longest metro line, which is where I, unassumingly dressed, disembarked earlier today.

For your spatial frame of reference:

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Ascending from the metro, I found myself in a courtyard bound by a thousand balconies. Paneláky rose on all sides. Defeated-looking grass clung to life among patches of brown snow and black dirt. Cigarette butts populated the ground at a rate of thirty per square meter--assuming a courtyard of 40x55m and accurate observation on my part, 66,000 in this courtyard alone.

At first, I was a shade underwhelmed. However, as each monstrous panelák I passed dutifully revealed another concrete expanse behind it, I began to feel the true enormity of this place. I wandered aimlessly through a world punctuated at every instance by concreted towers ripe with humanity: catenary clotheslines sagging with tablecloths, paisley skirts, and children's stained denim; cockeyed satellite dishes supported by erector-set construction; lawn chars perched on cinder blocks and mattresses; chainsmokers nestled in 14th-story roosts; soccer balls, shriveled and cracked. These human obelisks extended in every direction, a raw sprawl.

As I ambled through this endlessly drab but indisputably alive world, a rising sense of unreality took me. I began to internalize the unbending repetition, mechanically taking photographs and jotting notes. I don't know how long I meandered; time became gossamer and slick, slipped its clothespins.

Though I had arrived in mid-afternoon, I found the sun just moments from setting. Quoting from my notes at the time:

walking the grubby streets, light reflected from the windows is unexpectedly sandia [watermelon-colored]. when did the sun start setting? I'm seized by the irrational presentiment that when darkness falls here, the exits close and this bubble becomes isolated not only geographically, but breaks loose temporally. the inexplicable sensation of being trapped here when night falls, stuck in an anachronistic communist dream forever.

As I wound an uncertain way back through dusky streets, my feeling of unreality began to distill into something new. At first, I couldn't qualify the resultant feeling. Eventually, however, I was able to put it on paper:

here is the place in which the 20th-cent. fascination with modernity has been refined and brought to bear, poured into this place like a leaden glaze. everything drips with it, slick and sodden.
I have never felt more anonymous.