Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Mircea Cartarescu

meter above the ground. Another night I saw that I could step on the surface of the tar black water and I walked across it. But the nocturnal Circus Park, as different from the daylight park as woman from man, has never ravaged me as much as in the night when I arrived to an area I had not seen as a child, although I’d known it was there. It was very far, towards the Lacul Tei Boulevard, where the winding alley suddenly opened to a vast space of terrible loneliness. In the middle there was a basin full of black water. A statue was standing in the basin, a naked young man who defended himself with his arms against a terrible threat. His stony silent dread caught me too, because that

teenager was obviously me, his eyes enlarged with terror were my eyes. I have always been frightened, pure fear arisen not fromthoughts of danger, but from life itself. I have permanently lived the dread of the blind, the disquiet of the deaf. I could never truly sleep at night, because the instant I closed my eyes I knewtherewas somebody in the roomwhowas looking at me, who was slowly coming closer to my sleeping face. How could I defend myself when my senses resorbed, when I surrendered to the enormous world? My dread has always come especially from the fact that we do not know how the world is, we only know its face illuminated by senses. We know the world constructed

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