Litost and untranslatable words

i will read this again someday- more slowly.  i read it quickly this time, afraid for some reason that if i did not keep up a furious momentum that i would never finish it.  by the end, the symphony of images and connections and ideas was overwhelming.   i know i only gleaned the surface by racing through so quickly.  


A few among many:
"Make sure you have this image firmly engraved in your memory.  She must jump from square to square, right leg first, then left, then both together, and make a show of caring whether or not she steps on a line.  she must go on jumping day after day, bearing the burden of time on her shoulders like a cross that grows heavier form day to day.
Does she still look back?  Does she think about her husband and Prague?
No.  Not anymore."
-next to which i wrote:  HORRIFYING
(what is the cost of forgetting?  is it worth it?  is it possible?)

"The woman Jan loved so dearly was right in saying she was kept alive only by the threads of a cobweb.  It takes ridiculously little, an insignificant breeze, to make what a man would have put down his life for one minute seem an absurd void the next." .... and the whole part about BORDERS
-reached my core in regards to my experience when i realized that i could no longer believe in a god.  after all, my first entry of this blog stated my purpose to be "to give the blur a border"... because that is exactly how it felt- like i no longer had a frame from which to view and understand the world.

"'Yes, but that history is a part of us.  We can't escape it,' Jan objected.  'The woman who runs away to defend her honor.  The woman who gives herself, the man who takes.  The woman who veils herself, the man who tears off her clothes.  Time-honored images, every one of them, and all a part of us!'
'Time honored and idiotic!  More idiotic than holy images!  What if women are sick of following old patterns?  What if they're tired of doing teh same things over and over?  What if they want to invent new images, a new set of rules?'"
-this has dominated my thinking lately... a subject that makes it hard for me to be in the world.  it is a system that i am both disgusted by and accomplice to.  i do not know what a new set of rules would look like, but i feel so very certain that these rules are in horrible disrepair.

a heavy sadness and the bars of a cage.

MK cuts to the core.