reading notes from an interview with László Krasznahorkai
«Let me reply to that by telling you a story. Mihály Vig and I were walking along a street in Pécs together, and I was complaining to him that young people today are so terribly far removed from anything spiritual and intellectual. I said that when I was young, there was at least a handful of us who used to read, compose music, or paint pictures. In other words, we were thinking beings and were possessed by a search for something, which connected us. I was saying that this seems to have died out. To this, Mihály said to me that he thought I was wrong – the people I am thinking of still exist in the same numbers today, but they are not visible. And, pointing up at the windows there, that evening at Pécs, he asked me, “How do you know there is not one sitting up there right now? It is just that they don’t want to meet you as an ‘author’. They are busy. They cannot bear this world and are in some way testing a different one. Perhaps by creating something. Perhaps they are just sad and that’s why they can’t come. And that sadness will lead to something. To another gap for seeing out of the intolerable through to the tolerable. Or,” said Mihály, “he or she is sitting up there alone, reading your book, of all people’s.»