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TRAILS by Ivo ANDRIC

At the place where all paths and roads arise, at the very root of the notion of them, there is etched in my memory— deep and indelible— the first path I walked in freedom.

It was in the city of Višegrad, with its rough, uneven, almost gnawed paths, where everything was dry and desolate, devoid of beauty, of joy, of hope in joy, and of any right to hope. There, that bitter morsel that one has not even managed to taste dances in the throat with every step; there, the scorching heat and the wind and the snow and the rain eat away at the earth and the seed it harbours, and whatever manages to sprout and bear fruit they brand, bend and bow to such a degree that— if they could—
they would drive it back into the ground by the protruding end, only to return it to the darkness and the formlessness from which it had managed to escape.

Countless paths run there, like threads and cords, streaking the hills and slopes around the town,
flowing into the white road or vanishing by the water and among the green willows.
The impulses of people and animals traced these paths, and necessity pressed them into the ground.
It is hard to pass there, hard to go on, and hard to return. There one sits on a stone or takes shelter beneath a tree, on a dry patch or in scant shade— whether to rest, to pray, or to make a peasant’s reckoning of the day’s takings. Along those paths— swept by wind and washed by rain, corrupted and cleansed by the sun, where one encounters only worn-out cattle and silent, hard-faced folk—
there I formed my notion of the world’s wealth and beauty. There, ignorant and weak and empty-handed,
I was happy with an intoxicating happiness, to the point of dizziness— happy because of everything that is not there, cannot be there, and never will be.

And on all the roads and paths I later travelled in life, I lived only on that meagre happiness,
the Višegrad-born thought of the wealth and beauty of the created world; for beneath all the roads of the earth there always flowed, visible and tangible only to me, the sharp Višegrad path, from the day I left it
until today. Indeed, it was by that path that I measured my step and adjusted my gait. It has never left me throughout my life.

In moments when the world in which I lived— by some evil chance— wearied and poisoned me,
when my vision darkened and my direction wavered, I would reverently lay out before me, like a believer spreading his prayer rug, the hard, humble, exalted Višegrad path, which heals every pain and erases every suffering, because it contains them all within itself and surpasses them all in turn. Thus, several times a day— seizing upon every lull in the life around me, /every pause in conversation— I would traverse a stretch of that path from which one should never have descended in the first place.

And so, until the end of my life, unseen and in secret, I will nonetheless traverse the fated length of the Višegrad path; and then, at life’s thread-end, it too will break and disappear— there where all paths end,
where roads vanish and become pathless, where there is no more walking and no more striving. There,
all earthly roads will tangle into a meaningless knot and burn away like a spark of salvation
before our eyes— eyes that are themselves going out— for they have brought us to the goal
and to the truth.