Helia’s Reviews > How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed > Status Update

even today we are passionate collectors of foreign objects, as if we are still trying to possess this mythical ‘abroad’ or the imitation of it.

I guess nowadays collecting doesn’t reflect the state of facts as much as the state of our minds. We are hungry for things and afraid of the future.

Still thinking no, no, it won’t happen, not here, not now, clinging to the kitchen sink as if that cold, solid metal is the sole definite point in reality, and if you grab it tightly enough, it will hold your world so it will not fall apart that very instant? It’s morning, you are alone in your ghostly house, and you don’t know what one is supposed to do now on this strangely quiet-looking day.

The smell of bread, the voices outside, the peace and quiet of a normal life all disappeared, as if the new day had been sucked in by a whirlwind from that blinking screen. Instantly, I found myself in the middle of a battleground.

This is why cities become mirrors of our inner selves. Their genuine beauty is in their perfectly human size, in the feeling that you can master them, not that they are mastering you. They have a center and people need centeredness: it gives them security.

we have a chance to repossess our cities,treat them as if they are not merely places we are sentenced to be in or only pass through. we first have to realize the meaning of a public space in general. We have to understand that the public space is not a Kleenex that one uses, crumples, and then throws away. It’s more like a handkerchief, embroidered at the edges,that one has to wash and iron to be able to use it again

The cities have been killed by our decades of indifference, by our conviction that somebody else — the government, the party, those ‘above’ - is in charge of it. Not us. How can it be us, if we are not in charge of our own lives?

In these endless, ancient, kitchens, while the soup is boiling, we talk of men - sorrowful talk, as old as the smell of soup, as warm as a fireplace and the feeling of intimacy we share.

For our generation, it seemed that communism was eternal, that we were sentenced to it and would die before seeing it collapse. We were not revolutionaries trying to destroy it. We were brought up with the idea that it is impossible to modify the system.
One’s life is not a waiting room in a provincial train station, where one sits waiting for a train that might never come.

What communism instilled in us was precisely this immobility, this absence of a future, the absence of a dream, of the possibility of imagining our lives differently. There was hardly a way to say to yourself: This is just temporary, it will pass. On the contrary, we learned to think: This will go on forever, no matter what we do. We can’t change it. It looked as if the omnipotent system had mastered time itself.