Night Train to Lisbon

I always wanted to run away. Run away from this present, to an unknown present of others.

To walk into darkness, leaving behind everything that I created. And walk into another life with nothing to loose. I don’t know what that feeling is all about, but I found out something close to it.

Night train to Lisbon is a novel, originally written in German by Pascal Mercier, translated into English by Barbara Harshav. This I am afraid to say, now stands on the top of my favorite list. I don’t have the language to express my emotions and that I believe is my greatest weakness and as well as my greatest strength.

Our life, those are fleeting formations of quicksand, formed by one gust of wind, destroyed by the next. Images of futility that blow away even before they have properly formed.

Sometimes I grapple with the things that happened and try to reason out. Flailing most of the time.

I stand here completely by chance; you stand there completely by chance, between us the champagne glass. That’s how it was. No different.

I hated expectations and commitments. But no matter what, they always looked up on me.

Once could have the hope that he would become more real by reducing expectations, shrink to a hard, reliable core and thus be immune to banished every long, bold expectation, a life where there were only banal expectation like “the bus is coming”.

In order to understand life, you need to experience death. So should we take the promising immortality by god in his kingdom of heaven?

It is death that gives the moment its beauty and its horror. Only through death is time a living time. Why does the lord, the omniscient god, not know that? Why does he threaten us with an endlessness that must mean unbearable desolation?

It took me almost a month to complete this book, not because it language is so mystifying and deep, but because I didn’t want it to end. I really am looking forward to read the original version.

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