The lesson Zweig teaches you is as beautiful as it is painful. „My today is so much different than all my yesterdays; I have risen and fallen so often, that sometimes I feel as if I have lived not just one but several lives. When I say, without thinking, ‘my life’, I often find myself instinctively wondering which life.” And: „But if we can salvage only a splinter of truth from the structure of its ruin, and pass it on to the next generation by bearing witness to it, we will not have lived entirely in vain.” Read it, and live as if yesterday and today were the only things you could really own.

Earlier rendered as Remembrance of Things Past – it will always remain the ultimate experience of “now” in time and space – and the image I will have of Paris. This has always been my go-to-answer to the question of one item I would take with me to a desert island, as I could pretend the 7 volumes are indeed just one object, and I will also obviously be able to take the whole universe there with me, as this is a micro- and macrocosm of life painted through words. It teaches you to pay attention and to look at things in a different way. I make it my daily exercise to observe my surroundings as I would read about it in Proust.

Look at the title and you’ll get a feeling of what you’ll experience – life as it is, and as it was, the calm flow of time and the soft experience of space one can only enjoy in that way in Czech Republic and through literature that gives this „far away country we know little of” heart it has and space it deserves.

Written in 1954 and only fully published in 1999 Tyrmand’s diary is not only an introduction to Warsaw, the way my generation imagines it, based on the photos of Tadeusz Rolke, Wajda’s and Polanski’s movies and accompanied by Komeda’s jazz – it’s a diary of a sensitive intellectual. Notes on life, relationships, artists’ struggles – and human ones too. This is what I think of Warsaw and how I experience it; what I think of Polish intellectual history and what I think of choices we’re facing every day – something that has not changed in almost 70 years – trying to figure out what matters in life, while strolling the streets of a city that once was, and isn’t anymore.