Sanatorium pod Klepsydra Word from: Mordy

"People gather in the market square, silent under the enormous cupola of light, and group themselves without thinking into a great, immobile finale, a concentrated scene of waiting; the clouds billow in ever deepening pinks; in all eyes there is calm and the reflection of luminous distances."

The quote is from Bruno Schulz's Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, which besides being one of the coolest titles for a book ever, also ranks as one of the most gorgeous contributions from Jewish-Polish literature (name another, I dare you). It's also the book that inspired Cracow Klezmer Band's new avant-klezmer album, of the same title.

But doesn't the quote above lend itself to a different cultural paradigm? Not to drag two fine works of art into the realm of pop-culture, but Spielberg's War of the Worlds just came out, and the Village Voice gave it a hot review. Michael Atkinson speaks about its allusions to September 11th, with its burning skies, missing people posters, etc. The best descriptions in Schulz's book conjures up those apocalyptic visions almost effortlessly.

"A frightened, yellow, foredoomed glare shone from these streaks across half the sky; the curtain was falling quickly. The pale roofs of houses shone with a moist reflection; it was getting dark and the gutter pipes were beginning to sing in monotone."

Sanatorium was first published in Poland in 1937. That predates Spielberg's apocalypse by almost 70 years.