Trafika Europe 1 - Northern Idyll

birthday) – and I admired the sheer diversity of skill and all the things he could do. But envy him I did not: the settled life for some, the gypsy life for others. The Hat’s progress through life was steady, no hairpin bends. He could probably have understood if El had abandoned sport to devote himself to his family, or his business, or another sport, to science, to something “serious”, but El went off into space (which they say has a blackness we don’t have here on earth) and thereby sinned against balanced priorities The Hat saw as sacrosanct. “At your age I was into everything, swimming, track and field... I even played the trumpet – and took my son to the nursery! You guys, though, don’t seem interested in anything.” The Hat saw things clearly, but he was looking up from ground level, his only perspective, so how was he going to understand that rhinoceros on El’s chest? The guy was into everything, but everything interested him only to the extent that he could make it, or press it, or complete it, otherwise he saw nothing and just passed by. That’s the way it always is, but we wanted more, to go from rags to riches on a jet engine. We wanted the big time. Achilles rushes into the river and finishes off the Trojans right there in the water – till there are so many corpses, they dam the river and it pleads, “I cannot flow! Kill them in the fields,” but Achilles shrugs, as if he holds the world in his fist. We understood that, but we were just sad guys who couldn’t make it into orbit. So screw everything! We would watch the leprous society around us go to hell in a handcart.

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