Still Sundays

November 7th.

Centrifuge known and that which can’t be known. Orhan Pamuk. Duke Ellington. A love without drum roll of epiphanies.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

It’s Sunday morning in Prague.

It is still a concealed dawn and the smell from the night rain stubbornly loiters on the cobblestone streets that echoed inattentive pedestrians yesterday. The magnitude of quietness in Prague is distinct: every stone has a story, every turn a whisper, every ally leads to a dim lantern that doesn’t reveal enough.

My mother and I arrived on a Tuesday morning in Prague (October 26^th) and spent some days exploring this mysteriously beautiful city before making our way to Budapest and Vienna. My desire to return to Prague continued to flicker in the periphery of my awed exploring.

Looking back on it, it was the second night in Prague, somewhere between jetlag and what felt like a hexed deep sleep, I awoke feeling a transposition within.

I remembered.

I didn’t set out on this short journey looking for anything. Given my schedule, as compared to the rest of the family members, I was the most suitable travel companion for my mother’s short vacation that was most reasonably priced. The return flight from New York City to Prague was cheaper than that to Vienna so we decided to add Prague to the itinerary. The highlight of the trip was decidedly Vienna. Prior to departure all “signs” pointed to a “must visit” to Vienna yet it was Prague that cast a spell on me.

The Universe is a charmer indeed; seldom can we predict the depth of the treats.

Stepping into a new geography is very much like discovering a new human being or the same one but for the first time. A deep interest is kindled but in the most insignificant way. One never quite knows “what did it.” Perhaps it was the way sunlight weaved in and out of a river when you looked down a bridge. Perhaps it was the way a man or woman left you speechless with a stare that only rested in your imagination.  It matters not whether it is a city or a person that induces a shift within but, if you are lucky, you at the very least find yourself curious. If you are fortunate, you don’t confuse the inquiry with love. If you are really favored, the exploration is love.

So what if it happens to be the world-renowned Charles Bridge? So what if it happens that your words and dreams are looping, twisting, lacing a reality you couldn’t even imagine.

So everything.

Love that returns you your inner most longing doesn’t necessarily come with a drum roll of epiphanies.

If you can hush your mind long enough to sift through the cold, the detached, the past, the you you don’t approve, you can’t help but hum to a hymn of love that is in the architecture of every city that has and will stand the test of time: from the forts of Lahore to the cathedrals in Prague.

A love that is a remembering.

This shopkeeper selling Alfonso Mucha scarves and prints in Prague told me: there is no God, only intuition. I told him some would take either if they only knew how easily they could access either.

One of my favorite authors, Orhan Pamuk, said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

“A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know.”

So when readers of my stories ask, “But how do you know?” I really mean my short answer, “But you too know.”

Duke Ellington said, “Of all of man’s fears, I think men are most afraid of being what they are.”

I think we are afraid of not just of being who we are, but also knowing what we do know given much does escape our calculations.

I return to my beloved New York City tomorrow—a city I fell in love with before I knew what love was. I was twelve and I knew. She wasn’t perfect and I wasn’t perfect. She was a paradox and I had been accused of the same before I could spell paradox.

There are cities that allow us to crack the code of infinity: Prague, I welcome you to those precious few. Could I live here? I don’t know. It is dark, winters long, language a barrier, and a cold that is beyond the weather. But I know I want to return for another longer visit.

I return to New York with a big writing project whose first draft awaits completion. It began in 2006 in South Africa. Prior to this trip I had decided I am choosing writing as a “hobby on the side and if something bigger comes of it then so it does.” I was humbled to learn that can’t be so. It’s painful but it need not accompany suffering.

Somewhere in my Tuesday’s stories a story was written that demands to be heard through more stories. So the second book is born: Thais. I spoke with Anthony Lawlor and told him I didn’t know if I should finish what I had been working on or work on Thais which was coming too naturally. He told me if I listened closely enough during this trip, I would know. I know. Thais requires me to go to Egypt which will happen next year.  For now I must finish the first draft of something that began in 2006.

“I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.” ~ Orphan Pamuk

I am not sure whether my first book will be the Charles Bridge but I do know it will be a bridge to a new world.

It’s Sunday.

I return from the complex mysteries in Prague to the complicated paradoxes in New York City.

It’s all so simple if we have the courage to centrifuge what we do and don’t know.

~a.q.s.

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