A Mountain from the North: Chapter XIV
Rent from DeepDyve- A Mountain from the NorthChapter XIV
The stone they used to render the perfect surface of the courtyards and which, for a long time, they called kogetsu was not local but excavated at specially selected flint mines in mountainsides a good hundred nautical miles from here in picturesque Takagaso province, as well as at ever less significant sites, and it was there they ground it into tiny pieces using enormous millstones driven by mules, running regular trade trips to Kyoto, a city that cast its spell on the whole nation, the stone hauled to the grander monasteries by means of small carts, just as they did here in Fukuine district, tipping the small stones out behind the monastery on a neglected patch of ground somewhere between commercial buildings and the vegetable gardens, where specially designated young novice monks would bring heavy masonry hammers and set to reducing the stone to the requisite uniform size before carrying it into the courtyards and spreading it out so that after a storm or major downpour, or maybe just one dawn, as an act of gratitude for the arrival of spring, they might take their wide iron rakes and shape the white rubble into parallel waves so it was no longer simply an idea but a true embodiment of a paradisal perfection which is like a representation of the restless western sea and [End Page 562] the waves that here and there swirl about the ragged cliffs but is really the dream of a simple undifferentiated beauty that says we have everything and nothing, that the incomprehensibly terrifying speed that comprises objects and processes locked into an apparently necessary endless cycle of flashes and cessations may nevertheless persist with a brilliance that is as profound as the incapacity of language before an indescribably beautiful meaningless landscape, like myriad waves exactly like each other on the vast distances of the ocean, like a courtyard in a monastery where an even and serene surface sprinkled and carefully raked with white rubble might calm a pair of deeply startled eyes or an expression plunged into madness and a few precariously stable minds, and experience the way an ancient, now somewhat foggy idea can simply come alive, so it is suddenly obvious that there are no parts, only the whole. [End Page 563]
László Krasznahorkai received the German Bestenliste-Prize in 1993 for his novel The Melancholy of Resistance, which, like his novel Santanango, was made into a feature film by Béla Tarr. Other works include War and War; The World Goes On; He Neither Answers nor Questions: Twenty-Five Conversations on the Same Subject; Animalinside; and The Last Wolf. In 2004, he was awarded the Kossuth Prize by the president of Hungary. George Szirtes, fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, received the Best Translated Book Award in 2013 for László Krasznahorkai’s Santanango. The Slant Door, his own first book of poetry, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and his volume Reel won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2004.
