Day One Hundred Twenty-one, in Which the Narrator Transitions

Everyone is gone.

The program is over, and the saner of its number have left, flying west over the Atlantic, deplaning in Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York (city & upstate), Georgia, Colorado, Washington, California. Other places, too: as many as there are people.

I am here, still. I ride the tired tram routes (hi, 17) we made sweaty arteries of youth and Americanism that sometimes embarrassed us, yeah, they did. Sometimes. Anyway. They're dry now, just sere veins of Czechs who somehow look more foreign to me than they did in January.

I'll stay here for another month, reading and writing (maybe in this space!), and then I'll travel to Slovakia and Hungary to teach English. I will return to Los Angeles in August, possibly on a cargo ship.

Tomorrow I am moving to an apartment in a different part of Prague, a little rougher, maybe, but 'cheap' and 'different,' a combination I chase almost as much as 'smart' and 'into Virgina Woolf.' It's on--I just turned my head right, looking for the map of Prague that's hung there all semester, but it's packed--Slezská Street, which is sort of on the border between the districts of Žižkov (used to be rough, gentrifying) and Vinohrady (young, gay, haunted by starving literati and other walking tropes). East Prague.


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I'm sitting here, reading Too Loud a Solitude (Hrabal, 1976). I haven't read it since I was eighteen. People ask me why I come to Prague and if I don't make a joke (what this is Prague goddamn that hot-air balloon conductor, etc.) I say something about how I Was 'Really Into' Czech Literature a Few Years Ago and So That Piqued My Interest How About You? The book that I have in mind when I say this is Too Loud a Solitude.

It's this shimmering slim slice of literary magic that 'brought' me here, if anything did, which I sort doubt that anything did, but. It is a rarity in that it's just as good as the first time I read it--and so rich, so newly textured by four months in Prague, the only city that could have produced this book, bleeding its own oracular mystery out in ink.

So, like any good protagonist, I've reached back into the prologue and drawn out a neat, golden thread of continuity and sewn everything up, right at the end.

I like that. It's a nice way of ending a story. A very nice way.