The Inner Valley

I lived in those times. For a thousand years I have been dead. Not fallen, but hunted; When all human decency was imprisoned, I was free amongst the masked slaves. I lived in those times, yet I was free. I watched the river, the earth, the sky, Turning around me, keeping their balance, The seasons provided their birds and their honey. You who live, what have you made of your luck? Do you regret the time when I struggled? Have you cultivated for the common harvest? Have you enriched the town I lived in? Living men, think nothing of me. I am dead. Nothing survives of my spirit or my body. ******* ✎  Robert Desnos (Paris, France, 4 July 1900 ~ Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, Czechoslovakia, 8 June 1945).

"For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived." ******* ✎   Milan Kundera (Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1 April 1929). ◙ Artwork: Ludwig Meidner