I’m currently reading The Melancholy of Resistance by the 2025 Nobel Proze in Literature laureate, László Krasznahorkai, in a brilliantly readable translation by George Szirtes. I expect I’ll write about it some time next month, after my Book Group meets. For now, I just want to say that I’m loving it, and I want to make one of my November stanzas from a passage in it. Mr Eszter is an old man who has given up on life, rarely leaves his house or even his bed. My stanza is taken from a splendid passage where he goes on at misanthropic, nihilistic length.
November verse 11: After László Krasznahorkai
The world will always disappoint you.
Full of banging, screeching noise,
the sounds of struggle all about you.
Barracks for unruly boys,
uninsulated, draughty, dreary –
no rest for the sad or weary.
That's our lot. Sweetness and light
are just a distant dream, all right?
We're masters of the self-deceiving
endless fever-burn of hope
though all the evidence says Nope.
Faith's just a matter of believing
there could be another state –
and music's just an opiate.
It’s funnier in Krasznahorkai’s prose. If you’re interested in the source material, it’s on page 121 of the 2016 Tuskan Rock Press edition. Here it is in small type:
The world consisted merely of ‘an indifferent power which offered disappointment at every turn’; its various concerns were too incompatible and it was too full of the noises of banging, screeching and crowing, noises that were simply the the discordant and refracted sounds of struggle and that this was all there was to the world if we but realized it. But ‘his fellow human beings’, who also happened to find themselves in the draughty uninsulated barracks but could on no account bear their exclusion from some notion of a distant state of sweetness and light, were condemned to burn forever in a fever of anticipation, waiting for something they couldn’t even begin to define, hoping for it despite the fact that all the available evidence, which every day continued to accumulate, pointed against its very existence, thereby demonstrating the utter pointlessness of their waiting. Faith, thought Eszter, recognising his own stupidity, is not a matter of believing something, but believing somehow things could be different; in the same way, music was not the articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of a better world, but a disguising of the fact of our irredeemable selves and the sorry state of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete, twisted denial of such facts: it was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate.
I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
Me fail? I fly! 