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112 | Light within the Shade Funeral Eulogy Dearly beloved, behold this man who died and swiftly left us. We’re cheated and denied. We knew him. He wasn’t great or set apart, he was just a heart that was close to our heart. But he’s gone. He’s like the earth. The treasure-house has fallen in. All of you should learn from his example then. Such is a man. A unique specimen. Nobody’s lived like that before or since, and as no two tree-leaves are exact prints of each other, his like won’t ever come again. Look at this head, these dear eyes shrunk to his brain. Behold, here is his hand, his humanness, lost already in a fog of speechlessness, turning into stone like a relic bone and on it graved in cuneiform we see the secret sign of his one life’s mystery. Whoever he was, he was but heat and light. Everyone knew it, spoke it: that was him all right. As he chose this dish or other at his meal, and as his lips spoke, that are now placed under seal of silence, that voice which rang out merrily —church bells drowned deep in the hollows of the sea— and as he said, not so long ago, “Oh please, darling, I’d like a little piece of cheese,” and drank a sip of wine and gaily stared at the cheap cigarette he held, that flared and smoked, and ran to phone, and with that theme and with those colored threads he wove his dream: de z ső kosz tol á n y i | 113 so on his forehead glowed the magic mark that of the millions he was his one self’s spark. Look for him in vain; not here in Hungary, not out in Asia, or in Cape Colony; Somewhere in the past, or in the times to be anyone could be born, but not he. No, nevermore will flash that strange pale smile he smiled before. Even the ever-moving fairy luck is vain to fix this miracle back up again. It’s all just like an old fairytale, dear friends, and he is the man with whom it starts and ends. Life thought him up once only, when we began to tell these tales of him: “Once there lived a man . . . ,” Then on him fell the cruel tonnage of the sky and so we tell “Now he lives not . . . ,” and we cry. Here he lies, who struggled toward the better, a statue of himself, a block of matter. Not tears, words, nor drugs will make him rise again. Once he lived, once he did not, here among men. 1933 ...

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