Article: Arrow and wound: the art of almost dying. (Essay).

Five years before his death in 1986, Jaroslav Seifert, the unofficial poet laureate of Prague (and official Nobel laureate of Stockholm), published Vsecky krasy sveta (All the Beauties of the Earth), a book that was neither autobiography nor history nor fiction, precisely, but all of these and more: a gallery of small, precise portraits, each characteristically anchored in the mind's eye by a single, telling anecdote: a peddler's cart, picturesque with eight decades' worth of well-turned stories and three o'clock in the morning, second-bottle speculations; a collection of madeleines (or, rather, small Bohemian pastries), summoning a past both personal and, inevitably, ...