Lapidarium V

First Edition. Year of publication: 2002. Print run: 20,000 copies.

Preface

A lapidarium is a place — a square in a city, a courtyard in a castle, a patio in a museum — where found stones are deposited: the remnants of sculptures and fragments of buildings — here a shard of a torso or an arm, there a piece of a cornice or a column; in short, things that are parts of a whole that does not exist (any longer, yet, or ever), and with which no one knows what to do.

Perhaps they will remain as testimony to a past time, as traces of attempts, as signs? Or perhaps, in our world — already so overgrown, so enormous, and at the same time ever more chaotic and difficult to encompass, to order — everything is moving towards one vast collage, towards a loose collection of fragments; that is to say, towards a lapidarium?

Serialisation in Gazeta Wyborcza

The premiere instalments of Lapidarium V were published in the Duży Format supplement to Gazeta Wyborcza in 2002.

The first fragment, titled “The World Is Not a Rental Flat,” was published in Gazeta Świąteczna (Gazeta Wyborcza no. 300, 24 December 2001).

• 18 July, p. 20 — Heaven Is Hell • 25 July, p. 21 — Death Like a Breath • 1 Aug, p. 24 — Fears and Dreams • 8 Aug, p. 18 — Hatred Preserves • 14 Aug, p. 19 — On Life Turned Spectacle • 22 Aug, p. 29 — Beware of Those Trees • 29 Aug, p. 28 — The Hungry Will Not Fight • 5 Sep, p. 36 — Shadows in the Tropics • 12 Sep, p. 19 — The End of History Dislikes Contradiction • 19 Sep, p. 43 — Dogmatic Reason • 26 Sep, p. 28 — The Revolution of Dignity • 3 Oct, p. 53 — The Beggar’s Watch • 10 Oct, p. 25 — Life in the World of Pseudo • 17 Oct, p. 26 — The Impudence of the Ignorant • 24 Oct, p. 16 — The Poacher • 30 Oct, p. 21 — Familiar Climates • 7 Nov, p. 26 — We Live Under Different Skies

source: kapuscinski.info