FRANZ ROSEN

Exile

WHAT IS IT ABOUT MY NATIVE CITY? Because of the wars, it is mostly too new. What is old in it is often elephantine and suffocating. It has no charming medieval town. It is replete with bad smells, gasses that come from who knows where, as though it suffered from gastric distress. The light is pale and weak. The cruelty of its history speaks for itself. It harbors more than its share of rough characters. Its sense of time is disjointed and extreme. Everything there becomes tiresomely political. The inhabitants cannot be said to be well-dressed or elegant or beautiful, at least not to a notable degree. The food is what it is. The distances to get from here to there are enormous.

These are my complaints. Yet I flee to Sicily where it is very pleasant and long every day to return. It is where the subway lines move as my mind moves, where the streets are mostly where they were when I had my joy in them.