I am interested in The Next Village because it expresses with remarkable concision a fundamental experience of any ageing person: how dramatically the perception of one’s own life is changing over time.

I think that the main reason why the text is so powerful is that it conveys its meaning in a very abstract and yet extremely visual way: it kind of puts the two time-lines (life as perceived by a young man and as perceived by an old man) side by side and the conclusion is irresistible, because you involuntarily keep thinking of life as the series of things still ahead (or is it only me?) and looking at it that way the old man’s life is undeniably shorter than the young man’s. This “trick” is reminiscent of those kind of visual effects like the never ending staircase. It is also something remotely similar to the brain flipping the image transmitted by the eyes, as that image is necessarily inverted due the eyes’ optical structure. (Talking about optics, I’ve just seen on television the trailer of a Hungarian film adaptation of  Transformation (Verwandlung) by Kafka. The movie’s main “selling point” is a photographic technique designed to render K’s unique perspective: the movie was shot with a full-panoramic camera moving at ground level. It was pretty impressive even on television. It remains to see if the movie delivers enough in other aspects to make it comestible in its entirety, though.)

An interesting aspect of how I personally relate to The Nex Village is that I recognized (and appreciated highly) its “artistic machinery”  (described in the previous paragraph) not long after I had first read the text (about 10-15 years ago). But it was only in recent years that I really understood/experienced the meaning of the word “astoundingly”  in the first sentence. Well, it is pretty shocking indeed to see all the potential of your personal life reduced to an everyday “fight of survival”. To see your future changing from some undefined, all-encompassing variable to a narrowly defined path on a small, overcrowded planet — one string of events among the billions of other strings.

Citing a passage of “L’homme aproximatif” by Tristan Tzara may be in order here:

“les vies se répètent à l’infini jusqu’à la maigreur atomique
et en haut si haut que nous ne pouvons pas voir avec ces vies à côtés
que nous ne voyons pas
l’utltra-violet de tant de voies parallèles
celles qui nous aurions pu prendre
celles par lesquelles nous aurions pu ne pas venir au monde
ou en être déjà partis depuis longtemps si longtemps
qu’on aurait oublié et l’époque et la terre qui nous aurait sucé la chair
sels et métaux liquides limpides au fond des puits”

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Péter Kovács is a graduate of the University of Economic Sciences of Budaptest. A former journalist, and a former banker, he now works as a computer programmer. He writes a technical blog.