In the violet of an inexpressible sunset the high Tatras are already black outlines, sharing the profound mystery of all great mountains. Amedeo and Gigi are commenting on the play of light, the effects of refraction, the relation between those distant things and the perception which we have of them. At this moment we are all convinced that this blue and violet evening must exist somewhere, and in some way, forever, in the hyper-uranian world or the mind of God, as the incorruptible and everlasting Platonic Idea of Evening. It seems to us that those outlines, that light, that splendour materially contain in themselves these days through which we are passing, and their secret, like a fairy-tale lamp or ring that one only has to rub for a Genie to appear.
As we drive through the dark wood the headlights suddenly flash onto a signpost marked “Matliary, 2 km”. In the sanatorium at Matliary Kafka spent the months December 1920 to August 1921. The moment the lights unexpectedly pick this sign out of the darkness I remember a photograph showing Kafka in a group, with a timid, almost happy smile; and in the background are these trees of Matliary. That photograph, with that dark and utterly mysterious foliage, and this same wood which we are passing through this moment, are like walls of infinite thinness that have been blown away. That life which the photograph fixed in one of its instants has vanished for ever. Not even Kafka’s work renders up its secret entirely, because it too is paper, though far more real and substantial; but it is still unequal to the vanishing of existence, as even to the shadows of the wood we are passing through.
The holiday resorts in the Tatra Mountains, such as Tatranska Lomnica, sport a belle époque luxury tourist décor. Apart from Czechoslovaks, most of the present clientele comes from East Germany. The elegance of these resorts is not without some of the ostentatious unreality of places which only exist in the holiday season, or where the latter has overwhelmed or completely erased the original existence and life of the community. Vulgarity triumphs, showy and sophisticated, when people go to a town not simply to enjoy tranquil or prohibited pleasures, but rather to celebrate a rite which they consider necessary to their own rank and style. A libertine who indulges his own inclinations is not vulgar; but he becomes vulgar if as he does so he is concerned not only with enjoying his pleasures, but also with making a meaningful gesture which raises him a cut above other people.
A specific élite which carries out its historical and political function – an aristocracy still in command or a military caste in power – can even be odious and criminal, but it is neither gross nor snobbish, because it is doing a real, impersonal job which transcends each individual member. The visiting celebrities who created the myth of Capri have very often been stigmatized as vulgar, in so far as they constitute a dreary crowd of eccentrics, not representative of anything at all, but convinced of representing something thanks to their predictable capriciousness and ostentation of elegance. We are therefore not too unwilling to leave the restaurant of a big hotel in the Tatras, even if the meal was decent and at last – thanks to the international atmosphere – we have been able to drink a decent glass of beer.