It is easy to say life is elsewhere when you're strolling through a cemetery.
It is even easier when that graveyard is situated in a fortress complex called Vyšehrad high above Prague — a city more past than future anyway, — when there is a pervading quiet hanging around the place like a mist you can't wade through. It is a graveyard where famous men are buried, composers like Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák, writers like Jan Neruda and Karel Hynek Mácha. In a place so far-removed from modern life in both time and place, it is alienating to find Karel Čapek, the originator of the word robot in all of our languages, buried here.
A short walk from this cemetery, I sit down looking over a curve in the Vltava river, the many Gothic churches and castles of Prague looming in the background. The sky is blue, which is not how I imagined it to be in this city. Always when I pictured it, it was an oppressing grey.
I sit here and read Milan Kundera's Life Is Elsewhere. Kundera has adopted Rimbaud's adagium as a motto to what he calls the Lyric Age, to the young who always feel that inner trembling urging them to harder, better, faster, stronger. The main character of the book is most of the time simply described as 'the poet', but goes by the name of Jaromil. This poet for Kundera is just a vehicle to conjure up Lermontov and Shelley and Rimbaud and Wolker and all the others. He interchanges them in his narrative, the location shifting from Prague to Dublin to Paris and back. And the poet is always searching, always on the run, always uneasy, always in the wrong place. Even when history is being made:
The marchers had already passed the reviewing stand on Wenceslas Square and the blue-shirted young people were dancing to hastily improvised bands. Everything was gay and free, and people who were strangers just moments before joined in hearty camaraderie. But Percy Shelley is unhappy, Percy is alone.
He's already been in Dublin for several weeks, he's handed out dozens of flyers, the police know all about him, but he has not succeeded in befriending a single Irishman. Life always seems to be somewhere else.
This is unrest, the unrest of youth. But sitting here high above where the people look like ants, I extract an altogether different emotion out of the same phrase. Far, far away I hear the droning monotonous sound of an ambulance. Normally, there is a doppler effect, there is an increase and decrease of volume, there is unrest. Now, there is just a faint reminder that life is elsewhere, that reality is elsewhere, that all that is left up here is the outline of a dream that I myself am allowed to color in. The ambulance siren is just pleasant background noise.
Dream is reality, students wrote on the walls of the Sorbonne in the '68 riots in Paris. Kundera writes that it is never really clear whether the dream is a reality or the reality is a dream. Where I am now, it is all very dichotomous. Reality is below, and here in Vyšehrad is all that is left when all the real things are subtracted. A quiet hum of the breeze cutting through the grass.
