“Many times I watched him there, reading. He seemed immersed in confecting more tiny mechanisms, and the letters in the book — terribly small — looked like more tiny parts to be organized by his eye, to be called forth from nothingness, from stillness. At home were clocks, here were ideas, and both were abstract, cold and exact, subject to the will of a man trying to forget himself. Did he succeed? I don’t know. His face was at times illuminated from beyond, in expectation of what — or despairing of what — I am unable to say.
At least sixty years of life and twenty of death separate us. Even more — many more. He lived in the Middle Ages and I live today. We are separated by centuries. I don’t read the books he read or believe the things he believed in, I am surrounded by different people and have other preoccupations. And yet today I feel I am his grandson, his direct descendant, heir to his incurable melancholy.”
—
Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years (tr. Philip Ó Ceallaigh)
