Enchanted

“We played host to mysterious distinguished strangers and lost ourselves in conjectures in our desire to penetrate their disguises.  In the evenings everyone gathered in the great hall, where, by flickering candlelight, we listened to one tale or revelation after another.  There were times when the plot spun through these stories jumped out of the narrative frame and stepped among us, live and hungry for prey, and tangled us up in its perilous whorl.  Sudden recognitions, unexpected disclosures, an improbable encounter pushed their way into our private lives.  We lost the ground beneath our feet, placed in jeopardy by contingencies we ourselves had unleashed.  From far away the howling of wolves was carried on the air, we brooded over romantic entanglements, ourselves halfway caught up with their coils, while an inscrutable night rustled on the other side of the window, fraught with shapeless aspirations, ardent, incomprehensible confidences, unplumbed, inexhaustible, itself knotted into labyrinthine convolutions.” — Bruno Schulz, “The Republic of Dreams” (trans. Wieniewska)

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