Off Long Ago at the Present
Off Long Ago at the Present
By Joshua Chalifour
To the present soul and the future human:
The walls are already the room
and the furniture of now,
which if perhaps we increasingly repressed,
our measure of the future could expand.
A stunted soul is educated
at a small expense.
If we nurtured it, not of that which
we devoted little expense,
yet of our own past,
and if perhaps becoming it
we devote our furniture to it
and the attention is its own smart way
to grow up and break its order,
I'll burgeon your now, cultivating our past.
And which, if you're deprived
of another future and so
by it, are this same soul that
could develop,
go to these walls
chipped back, and find that
the original house has brought our
piece of the past.
From “The Story of the Soul and the Body”
By Milorad Pavić (translation: Christina Pribićević-Zorić) 1
1 Milorad Pavić, Landscape Painted with Tea, trans. Christina Pribićević-Zorić, 1st American ed (New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1990).
The human soul is a small house, and the room of the soul has its own furniture. This furniture is our present. If we nurtured, educated, and brought up our present, if we devoted the same attention to it that we devote to our past and future (which are the walls of the soul), perhaps it could develop, perhaps it could expand, burgeon, and grow at the expense of these walls that are the past and the future, and go back to its original measure and order, which we deprived it of so long ago by cultivating our past and our future at the expense of that repressed now, which is becoming increasingly stunted…. If you’re not smart, I’ll find a way to break off yet another little piece of your already chipped now….