`Its Provinciality and Splendor'

“I now walked the streets of Cracow ascertaining how much smaller it had become. But after a while, quite unexpectedly, I rediscovered my former admiration for the royal city. And so it happened that I roamed Cracow  feeling simultaneously  its smallness and greatness, its provinciality and splendor, its poverty and riches, its ordinariness and extraordinariness. I was certain of just one thing: the trees of Planty had grown. My admiration was undercut by doubt, but the trees had become even more majestic, even more real.”

[from Adam Zagajewski’s “Cracow,” Two Cities: Exile, History, and the Imagination, 1995, translated by Lillian Vallee]