One night walking back along Karlova
I was nearly knocked down by a bicycle rider
Lean with a black cap and goggles
What he was doing, Racing at night
Down those bone-shaking cobbles,
God nor man might know.
The above is excerpted from a short poem I wrote about something that indeed happened to me in Prague. Imagine, then, my uncanny shock on reading this poem:
While time is running away on Prikopy street
Like a racing cyclist who thinkgs he can overtake death's machine
You are like the clock in the ghetto whose hands go backwards
If death surprised me I would die a six-year-old boy.
The poem is "The Clock in the Old Jewish Ghetto" by Vitezslau Nezval (1900 - 1958) . With certain passages from Rilke and (of course) Kafka, the music of Janacek and, perhaps, the taste of a herbal liquor called Besherovka, this poem distills the essence of 'Prague', by which of course I mean my Prague, little more than a name, a pale flare over marshes, one of those Proustian names charged with the quiet dream of another life.