#16

“Somewhere over in Germany, in a town beside a lake, every evening a blazing swan would fly upon into the air, and after it had finished burning, it would fall down into the surface of the lake, the locals were horrified, so they organised some patrols and caught a young man, who had just lured another swan with a bread roll, he poured a bottle of petrol over it, and lit it, delighting himself with the sight of this blazing swan soaring up into the night... and when thay caught him, he was a young man, who said in his defence, that he was inspired by Salvador Dali, a painting of a burning giraffe had disturbed him so much at night that it made the room hurt, where he dreamt about this blazing giraffe and Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method, he'd wanted to pour petrol over a giraffe at the zoo to see its mane catch fire, but he couldn't reach up that high, so he'd lured over a trusting swan, and when it soared up blazing into the sky, he saw it rise to the zenith before it fell, he saw Salvador Dali's burning giraffe... and the world stopped hurting, and he didn't know how that image would strike me, like the surface of the pond which the once lovely swan hit in its cooling descent...” (Hrabal, 1998: 12-13)

HRABAL, Bohumil (1998). Total Fears Letters To Dubenka. Translation by James Naughton. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press.