Florenc (Prague Metro)

Pronounced Florents. Authorities haven’t deflected our questions about a missing [E] by mounting red and yellow plaques where an [E] could be hidden. Why, is itself an abstract capital in this most ancient of capitals. Is the station paying tribute to the Parisian novelist who wrote a whole novel without the main letter of the alphabet? [E]xcept there is another [E] there already. Remove the [E] and watch the line turn nil. The Tuscan city came before the Prague quarter came before the hotel came before the station. It was Sokolovská during the rain dribbly drab days of normalisation, down below so-called Sokol Street. O the wonder then of somewhere obscure and realist only available by [E]scalator! Hidden behind every plaque is an [E]mergency, the days of clampdown or liberation. They are no longer there but we can kind of see them if we look close enough. There are sober days when it is recalled how it could happen again: tanks, protests, speeches, enforced treaties. For under every Prague plaque is [E]xile, where Italy or England or America contain their own stories, of loneliness and repair. There we notice leaders-in-waiting, their every thought on the undeniable future. Interchange stations are a child’s game for the newcomer, following the yellow line [B] and the red line [C] to find the other platform. Though crowds of Czechs have forgotten what it’s like to be a child. It’s the workday, alone together. Because the thing that is missing is probably [E]xistentialism, no one has time. What is suppressed here is any kind of [E]xtravagance, something they may not need, being surrounded by such architecture, such centuries of [E]xhibition building. Mucha as much a swirl of [E]ffervescence as Kafka a firmness of [E]nergy, ever anxious for [E]rror. Not that I ever exited via Florenc. It was an underground vision from a  Metro window,a golden shrine, a minute of indulgence. I never had to step out there every day. I never had to live with the mundane reality, as the cliché goes, as clichés will. It is other people’s fragile natures must be tested in a place like Florenc. Pronounced Florents, by the Czechs. Dante refers to Bohemia, though he never visited. His whole life was spent piecing together again the city he couldn’t return to. He returned every day of his life, one way or another, in words and thoughts. He went down into the underground, as if that could lessen the pain. He could have filled volumes with the social transgressions of Prague. There is not an [E]book with the capacity to include all Dante had to say, but then it wasn’t his city. The pain is the lesson. He wished to fill the [E]mptiness with the world as he knew it, the world left behind. Not that the plaques at Florenc hide an [E], they are the colours of the two lines of a Metro that cross over at this station, an epsilon meeting at this one place under the one [E]arth.