4. He lives disassociated from mechanical time.

On a bus with a seat to myself, surrounded by oncestrangers and soonfriends we leave the Czech Republic and enter Poland. Correspondingly, the weather shifts. The CR was luminous. Like the sky was overflowing with blueberries and the sun was grinning to be stuck in the middle of it. As we enter Poland it starts raining immediately. The sky is uneven in its encompassing greyness and I feel solemn. This is how I have always known Poland to be. I just never thought it actually would be as I knew it. A tired fog obscures the rolling hills in the distance which now appear not green but a muddy black and it is not hard to doubt their existence. Yet, it is hard to find the strength to.

Kundera claims that countries in middle Europe suffer from “small nation syndrome” – that is, they are always stuck in between aggressors, superpowers. They must always doubt their continuing existence. I somehow feel a deep empathy here. As if I was acclimated to this mindset without my assent. Without my knowledge. This anxiety about existing is familiar. Comfortable. It seems so illogical that one should be and yet here one is. My reaction is at once grateful and skeptical. It is not that I fear for my existence but there is more to life than existing, is there not? If Poland became part of Germany, the USSR, did its people stop living. No. Only, they stopped living as Polish. Their existence as such no longer held any significance for they had been usurped. Others required their lives. Needed them to exist otherwise. Needed to eliminate them and create them anew. What is it to live in constant fear of this? How else to be but anxious? Empathetic?

Post script. As we roll into Krakow, graffiti on a wall informs me “this is a good day to have a good day”…The water falls in sheets.