Faced with the choice of a quick or slow death, which is not on offer for better or worse, most people would choose the former. Why suffer in vain? And why make those around you suffer? But many a fool like me would go for the latter. How else capture it in words? And how else tame it but by writing about it? Till the beginning of the bitter end, at least. In fact, some fools like me would settle even for an afterlife, no matter how brief, just to capture the bitter end, too. Granted, of course, the writings would survive.

Addendum (January 14, 2006)

Now and then, Nenad Popović, one of the leading Croatian publishers, brings me a book in exchange for so many of my pieces pasted on postcards, which I send him regularly. Today it was A Postcard from the Grave (Razglednica iz groba), written by Emir Suljagić.[1] “Ha,” it crossed my mind as soon as I saw the book, “someone got there ahead of me!” I was quite sure this was Nenad’s clever reply to this idle piece, which I must have sent him a few weeks ago. It is a book about Srebrenica, though, the worst genocide in Europe since 1945. And it took place in Bosnia as late as 1995. The writer is one of the rare witnesses. In a second, all jokes are off. All kidding is out of place. Including my childish flirting with death as a literary challenge.

Footnote

1. Zagreb: Durieux, 2005.