Prague Pictures: Portraits Of A City - Plot & Excerpts
Perhaps it is the snow that intensifies the silence of the city in these, my earliest memories of it. Prague's silence is more a presence than an absence. The sounds of the traffic, the voices in the streets, the tolling of bells and the chiming of innumerable public clocks, all resonate against the background hush as if against a high, clear pane of glass. There is too in my recollections a sense somehow of incipient flight, of everything in that sparkling scene being poised to slip its tethers and rise up into the dome of brilliant blue: poised, but never to break free. At that time, in the early 1980s, the Cold War was going through one of its decidedly warmer phases, although it was, did we but know it, already beginning to end. I had come to Czechoslovakia in the expectation that all my received ideas of what life was like in Eastern Europe would be overturned. I was to be disappointed - most of the cliches about communist rule would prove dispiritingly accurate - but also strangely exhilarated.
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