Dialog on Soul and Fate

The house in Bystrzec, 1927

Bystrzec gave the sense of distance from the people of the road, holidaymakers, scouts, human crowd and bustle, from the civilization of money circulation, to which the Hutsuls of the valleys finally succumbed. It was a response to life’s turbulences and failures, it was at the same time a consequence of a philosophical attitude, it was a choice. The cottage in Bystrzec was a kind of home on the road, a wanderer’s home, freed from the burden of the farm, a bit like a shepherd’s hut in the mountain pastures inhabited seasonally and equipped with the necessary appliances. It was a house where you could take care of yourself in the sense that you were the master of time, action, thinking, seeing and dreaming. With time, Bystrzec slowly ceased to be a home, it became a place and a non-place, a drop and the sea, a speck and the whole, a heavenly body and the cosmos. The rarefied air, mist, a sharp slant of light from behind the clouds, banal atmospheric phenomena which the capricious mountain weather does not spare, slowly form a system of signs of the world script, they draw figures against the landscape, they tell stories. And one story most often: about immortality, cosmic love that animates the world, about the world’s nuptials.