Leopardi in his Zibaldone reflects, “The more man grows (especially in experience and judgment, because there are many who always stay as children), and by growing becomes more incapable of happiness, the more he becomes prone to and feels at home with laughter, and a stranger to tears.” True, it is doubtful if we can say that man grows! Especially when in daily life he is not given to the freedom of his library, but he is insteadĪnd dumbfounded, mugged with expectation, haunted by a bitter past – an irrecoverable past, but then why would you want to? except to escape the benumbing aches and contumelies of a dull, moronic present, all life, past, present, and future – a shitshow, a shadow – a head bashing endlessly against a wall, and now comes some simping fool who asks, are you okay? This kind of question deserves only laughter it comes so late and among those who laughed in this manner through the existential absurdity was the emigre poet and playwright Antanas Škėma, whose 1958 novel Balta drobulė (translated by Karla Gruodis for Vagabond Press as White Shroud) is regarded, Gruodis writes in her introduction, as a modernist classic and favorite school text in Škėma’s native Lithuania. For some, cheerful positivity is not the default. Maybe you’re a bit stir-crazy from having been stuck indoors these past few weeks, a bit of Covid-19 Lockdown Blues maybe you have gripes against the world of longer standing.
S top me if you’ve been in this situation before: Someone asks you, noticing how off-kilter and full of hilarity you are, whether everything is okay.
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