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Golem gustav meyrink5/23/2023 ![]() ![]() More real, more human, more purposeful in many ways than the lives held within it, who become the phantoms: I quote at length, because this is one of the most awesome passages where the city becomes what is real and sentient. But many of the themes explored in the Kafka museum about the relationship between author and city, words and experience, are here connected. ![]() Meyrink writes in 1914, already the streets he described are mostly gone, lost in the 1895 sweep of renewal that cleaned and tamed it. If I turned my head a little I could see my window on the fourth floor across the street with the rain trickling down, the panes looked like isinglass, opaque and lumpy, as if the glass were soggy. The Prague once visible through such windows in the Jewish ghetto: Meyrinkâs The Golem is brilliant, taking you backwards to a Prague that I think perhaps is now only very rarely visible in shadows and courtyards. ![]() There are no hard and fast boundaries between them, geographical or otherwise, they are rather layered (even if found more in one place than another). ![]() Today though, it feels to me a triply divided city - the older sections jammed full of tourists and shops and mummified and tidied and meant for display, the newer suburbs that everyday vibrant life and imaginings have now been pushed into, and the awe and wonder of what Prague once was as experienced through the words of its authors. Prague is a city that lingers long in the mind and heart. ![]()
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