Read Online Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City by John Banville - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Banville
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Cordoba by Caliph al-Hakam II as part of a diplomatic
mission to the Emperor Otto I in Merseburg. The bookish but well-travelled Ibrahim, who would have known a thing or two about
the cities of the earth, was impressed by Prague's moneyed cosmopolitanism.
Legend, as the Blue Guide knows, has a deplorably lurid imagination, and in the matter of Prague's origins will have none of that boring stuff about
Migrations of the Peoples and dy- nast's first seats. No no, listen, it says excitedly in its rough demotic, this is how it
was: once upon a time in the east there were these three brothers, Czech, Lech and Rus. Seeking new homelands, they set out
westward at the head of their respective tribes. Rus halted at the Dnieper and became Father Russia, while the other two continued
on, Lech veering northwards to found Poland, and Czech climbing Rip hill in Bohemia and deciding that he liked all that he
saw. Czech's tribe settled down happily here, and after a couple of hundred years produced a new leader rejoicing in the name
of Krok 12 who lived at legendaryKrok had three beautiful daughters, Kazi the healer, Teta the priestess, and Ladythe prophetess. Presently Libuse inherited her father's throne and became ruler of the Czech Lands. However, since Czech's
male descendants, like most men, then as now, did not relish the idea of living in a matriarchy - or, as my Internet history
Runyonesquely puts it, 'a guy who did not like one ofdecisions as judge started a stink about the fact that the Czechs were ruled by a woman' -followed the dictates of a vision and sent a company of her subjects, accompanied by her white horse, into the forest in
search of ana ploughman, building aa threshold of a house, and there to found aa 'new town'. People and horse carriedOrac - Orac the Ploughmanin triumph back toCastle on its stony eminence above the Vltava, where he andwere married, thus founding the Pfemy-slid dynasty . . .
How curious it is, the way in which one's fancy lingers on the least of history's props, and how, lingered on, the props spring
suddenly to life. Beyond all this welter of names and dates and places, my attention keeps wandering back to that wooden bridge
over the Vltava that linked the New Town on the right bank to the old Slav quarter on the left. What did it look like, how
was it built? No sooner have the questions formed than the mind begins to drive the piles into the mud and link the arches
one by one. Romantically, legendarily, I see it in storm, straining against the surge of waters, or hovering on the mist of
mornings, or glimmering in the darkness of the vast medieval night . . . In the eleventh century the wooden structure was
replaced by a stone one, 'the so-called Judith's Bridge' of the Blue Guide - but why 'so-called'? - and in time that too was replaced, when the great architect Petersummoned to Prague in the city's Golden Age by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, in 1357 built the bridge named after the
Emperor that stands to this day, despite fire and flood and the generations of war.
At least, I think it was Peter Parlef who built it . . .
In the essay Building Dwelling Thinking, the philosopher Martin Heidegger meditates movingly on the essential nature of the bridge, the bridge's bridgeness, as der Meister aus Deutschland himself might put it. The bridge defines, brings into existence. 'It does not just connect banks that are already there. The
banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream . . . It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighbourhood.
The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream.' The bridge is a 'location,' he writes, 'it allows a space into which earth and
heaven, divinities and mortals are admitted.' Heidegger designates the bridge as a 'thing', in the ancient sense of gathering
or assembly. 'The bridge is a thing and only that. Only? As this thing it gathers the fourfold.'
Always and ever differently
mission to the Emperor Otto I in Merseburg. The bookish but well-travelled Ibrahim, who would have known a thing or two about
the cities of the earth, was impressed by Prague's moneyed cosmopolitanism.
Legend, as the Blue Guide knows, has a deplorably lurid imagination, and in the matter of Prague's origins will have none of that boring stuff about
Migrations of the Peoples and dy- nast's first seats. No no, listen, it says excitedly in its rough demotic, this is how it
was: once upon a time in the east there were these three brothers, Czech, Lech and Rus. Seeking new homelands, they set out
westward at the head of their respective tribes. Rus halted at the Dnieper and became Father Russia, while the other two continued
on, Lech veering northwards to found Poland, and Czech climbing Rip hill in Bohemia and deciding that he liked all that he
saw. Czech's tribe settled down happily here, and after a couple of hundred years produced a new leader rejoicing in the name
of Krok 12 who lived at legendaryKrok had three beautiful daughters, Kazi the healer, Teta the priestess, and Ladythe prophetess. Presently Libuse inherited her father's throne and became ruler of the Czech Lands. However, since Czech's
male descendants, like most men, then as now, did not relish the idea of living in a matriarchy - or, as my Internet history
Runyonesquely puts it, 'a guy who did not like one ofdecisions as judge started a stink about the fact that the Czechs were ruled by a woman' -followed the dictates of a vision and sent a company of her subjects, accompanied by her white horse, into the forest in
search of ana ploughman, building aa threshold of a house, and there to found aa 'new town'. People and horse carriedOrac - Orac the Ploughmanin triumph back toCastle on its stony eminence above the Vltava, where he andwere married, thus founding the Pfemy-slid dynasty . . .
How curious it is, the way in which one's fancy lingers on the least of history's props, and how, lingered on, the props spring
suddenly to life. Beyond all this welter of names and dates and places, my attention keeps wandering back to that wooden bridge
over the Vltava that linked the New Town on the right bank to the old Slav quarter on the left. What did it look like, how
was it built? No sooner have the questions formed than the mind begins to drive the piles into the mud and link the arches
one by one. Romantically, legendarily, I see it in storm, straining against the surge of waters, or hovering on the mist of
mornings, or glimmering in the darkness of the vast medieval night . . . In the eleventh century the wooden structure was
replaced by a stone one, 'the so-called Judith's Bridge' of the Blue Guide - but why 'so-called'? - and in time that too was replaced, when the great architect Petersummoned to Prague in the city's Golden Age by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, in 1357 built the bridge named after the
Emperor that stands to this day, despite fire and flood and the generations of war.
At least, I think it was Peter Parlef who built it . . .
In the essay Building Dwelling Thinking, the philosopher Martin Heidegger meditates movingly on the essential nature of the bridge, the bridge's bridgeness, as der Meister aus Deutschland himself might put it. The bridge defines, brings into existence. 'It does not just connect banks that are already there. The
banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream . . . It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighbourhood.
The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream.' The bridge is a 'location,' he writes, 'it allows a space into which earth and
heaven, divinities and mortals are admitted.' Heidegger designates the bridge as a 'thing', in the ancient sense of gathering
or assembly. 'The bridge is a thing and only that. Only? As this thing it gathers the fourfold.'
Always and ever differently
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