Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City Read Online Free PDF

all suddenly from the perspective of a little boy born to godless parents:
     the grimacing statues, the cross-eyed martyrs in stained glass, the shot-torn regimental banners, the maniacally carved pulpit,
     all quite mad - Larkin was right and hideously menacing. What frightened my son most, he later confessed, were the sotto voce comments and encouragements that the choir master breathed into his microphone in the pauses between verses; they must have
     sounded like the celestial chidings of weary, terrible old Yahweh himself.
    Yet it occurs to me that a few centuries ago my son in that place would not have been frightened at all, only awed, and dazzled,
     too. We easily forget that ours is a world permanently lit, that we live in a garish, practically nightless present in which
     our senses are assailed from all sides, by small flickering screens and huge advertisement hoardings, by public music, by
     a myriad perfumes, by the textures under our hands of rich stuffs and polished hides. The world out of which this cathedral
     grew was another place entirely. In the opening pages of The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga writes:
    When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness
     and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness
     and absoluteness that joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child . . . Just as the contrast between summer and winter
     was stronger then than in our present lives, so was the difference between the light and dark, quiet and noise. The modern
     city hardly knows pure darkness or true silence any more, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a
     lonely distant shout.
    What an aspirant marvel St Vitus's must have been long ago, with its Golden Portal glowing, its great doors flung open and
     its rose window angling down God's celestial light. The colour, the sonorities, the incense, the thousand candles burning.
     And the bells. Huizinga again: 'The bells acted in daily life like concerned good spirits who, with their familiar voices,
     proclaimed sadness or joy, calm or unrest, assembly or exhortation.'
    'Churches,' Ripellino remarks, smacking his lips almost audibly, 'exert a fatal attraction on Prague fiction's morbid characters.'
     A key scene in Meyrink's ghastly and sometimes risible novel The Golem takes place in St Vitus's Cathedral, amid the 'enervating smell of tapers and incense'. 7 Even the commonsensical Jan Neruda, chronicler of the doings of the simple folk of Mala Strana, feels drawn to that grey
     stone eminence on the hill, where within its fastness he in his turn detects that not so enervating but no less 'distinctive
     combination of incense and mould found in every house of worship'. In Neruda's story 'The St Wenceslas Mass', the narrator
     recalls how when he was an altar boy, he and his friends knew for a fact that St Wenceslas returned every night at the stroke
     of midnight - when else? - to celebrate Mass at the cathedral's high altar. One night he hid himself in the locked cathedral,
     determined to witness the saint return to enact the ghostly ceremony. As the last faint glimmer of evening fades and night
     comes on, and 'a silvery, gossamerlike radiance floated over the nave,' the boy is seized with a numinous terror: T felt the
     entire burden of the hour and of the cold, and suddenly I was overcome by a vague - yet for its vagueness all the more shattering
     - terror. I did not know what I feared, yet fear I did, and my weak, childlike mind was powerless to resist.'
    Prague writers love to frighten themselves, especially the decadents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
     They revel in the uncanny. Their fiction, according to Ripellino, 'is characterised by an oppressive recurrence of the Spanish-derived
     image of the crucifix [Habsburg emperors of the sixteenth and