“After that, I’ve thought to myself many times, couldn’t I have chosen instead to have a peaceful life in a small wooden hut high up in the mountains, where the cold air would have been cutting my skin and filling my lungs with the scent of grass, soil, mould and wet rock… yes, and there, in my workshop, I would have been spending my hours in wood-carving, patiently enjoying, through my horn-rimmed glasses, the painstaking process in which the shapeless takes on shape. Or, cozily sitting in a pyramid-shaped house, with walls covered in mirrors from the outside, amid beams and clouds of smoke, I could have been spending my time in reading rare manuscripts, books in astrology, mystical passages… and so night after night… separated by a day spent in watching the sun, in breathing the scent of fresh and decaying grass, in sneezing from the pollen, in watering and hoeing the vegetable beds… hoeing, breathing, hoeing, until I feel in all my members the enjoyable heaviness and the burning pain of fatigue, the fatigue one feels when one has left his body fall apart from the inside for the sake of bringing together something in the outside… Or, I could have withdrawn into a desolate cave, where I could have been drinking the water of mountain springs, climbing and hiking, breaking wood to pieces, twisting ropes, throwing stones, cutting my arms and hands — to see what I’ve been made of, to feel the sweet pain of being alive!… Yes, there is a sweet pain that makes you feel alive, that makes you feel awake, that opens your eyes for what’s beautiful and true… Do you hear me, Adam!… But there is also the bitter kind of pain, the kind of pain that can make you hate your own parents for causing you to live in this world, that makes you wish to correct their mistake!…”
(from “The Unsettling Love-Hate Story of Bewildered Anatoly” by Anton Chikakchiev)
LETTERS OF FIRE, PAGES OF SKY 