Authors: Michal Ajvaz
also by michal ajvaz in english translation
The Other City
translated by andrew oakland
dalkey archive press
champaign / london
Originally published in Czech as
Zlatý v
k
by Hynek, 2001
Copyright © 2001 by Michal Ajvaz
Translation copyright © 2010 by Andrew Oakland
First English translation, 2010
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ajvaz, Michal, 1949-
[Zlaty vek. English]
The golden age / by Michal Ajvaz; translated [from Czech] by Andrew Oakland.—1st English translation.
p. cm.
Originally published: Zlaty vek, Prague: Hynek, 2001.
ISBN: 978-1-56478-618-0
1. Travel—Fiction. I. Oakland, Andrew, 1966-II. Title.
PG5039.1.J83Z39 2010
891.8’635—dc22
2009048556
Partially funded by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency
This translation was subsidized by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic
Without doubt, metaphysics has to do with everything that exists. However, the totality of what exists, including what has existed and will exist, is infinitely small in comparison with the totality of the Objects of knowledge. This fact easily goes unnoticed, probably because the lively interest in reality which is part of our nature tends to favor that exaggeration which finds the non-real a mere nothing—or, more precisely, which finds the non-real to be something for which science has no application at all or at least no application of any worth.
[…]
There is not the slightest doubt that what is supposed to be the Object of knowledge need not exist at all.
Alexius Meinong,
The Theory of Objects
And they are each other than one another, as being plural and not singular; for if one is not, they cannot be singular but every particle of them is infinite in number; and even if a person takes that which appears to be the smallest fraction, this, which seemed one, in a moment evanesces into many, as in a dream, and from being the smallest becomes very great, in comparison with the fractions into which it is split up.
Plato,
Parmenides
The whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished.
Franz Kafka, “The Cares of a Family Man”