"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146
Home
About twelve kilometers from the geographical center of Europe, in a country called Slovakia, lies a small city called Handlová. My birthplace. The place I call home from somewhere deeper than habit. A city where my grandparents taught me things I didn't know I was learning, where my mother's cakes filled the kitchen with a smooth warmth.
Most of us carry a place like this. A coordinates of memory, good and bad, feeling and nostalgia braided together until they become indistinguishable.
As time passes, as it accelerates in that unique, almost imperceptible way, these moments grow distant. And yet, simultaneously, they calcify into something foundational, lodged in the mind and the body.
Time is taking something with it. There is less we can articulate now about our sharpest moments then. The details dissolve. Not into forgetting, exactly, but into a kind of irrelevance that feels, when you pause long enough to notice it, like a small and bloodless violence.
Handlová, Slovakia, 2007
Poetic Edda in the Forest above Handlová, Slovakia, 2015
The Night
I have always loved solitary activities. Introspection. The company of my own silence. Often in nature, often on a bicycle. I used to ride south from Handlová, through forests and fields that, over the years, became almost mythic in what they meant to me. Many of those rides happened at night. Many of those hours were spent alone among trees in full darkness. And I found comfort there. Not fear, not reverence. Just absolute comfort.
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This troubled my mother's calm, as it would. But somehow she understood me. Somehow she recognized the nyctophilia living inside her son, and let it be. Now, alone here in Norway, thinking through days that are themselves a kind of night, growing older and introspectively overcharged, it feels right to pause. To hold these things up to what little light there is, and look.
The Distant Fields
On those night rides south of Handlová, the forest did not hide itself from me. It revealed a different version of itself, one that existed only without light, only without witnesses. The fields beyond the trees opened into a blackness so total it became geographical, a country unto itself. I knew those roads by feel. By the rhythm of gravel under tires, by the grade of the hill, by the smell of pine resin cooling in the air after a hot day. My body had memorized what my eyes could not confirm. And in that blindness, I was more present than I have ever been in daylight.
But presence is not permanence. That is the thing no one tells you about the places that form you.
The Handlová I carry is not the Handlová that exists. The forests have grown or been cut. The fields have changed hands, changed shape, changed purpose. The kitchen where my mother baked has continued without me in it, accumulating years I was not there to witness. And the boy on the bicycle, the one who rode into darkness like it was a second home, he is not me. He is someone I remember being, which is a different thing entirely. A photograph of motion. A scent caught in a hallway that belongs to no one anymore.
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This is the quiet severance that time performs. Not dramatic. Not grief, exactly. Closer to a slow and mutual forgetting between you and the place that made you. You return, and the streets are familiar but not yours. The proportions have shifted. A building you remember as enormous reveals itself as modest, ordinary. The distance between your old home and the edge of the forest, a distance that once felt like a crossing between worlds, is just a walk. Five minutes. Maybe less. The mythology collapses under the weight of adult measurement, and what remains is simple geography.
Forests of Handlová, Slovakia
Ascend of the Blessed
So you are left with a necessity. You must build again. Not rebuild, because the original architecture is gone and cannot be reconstructed honestly. You must create new rooms inside yourself. New places to stand in the dark and feel that old comfort, even if the dark is different now, even if it is Norwegian dark, which is longer, colder, and carries the salt of a different sea. You must find new roads your body can memorize. New silences thick enough to think inside of.
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I am doing this now. Slowly, with the patience of someone who understands that the thing being built will also, eventually, become the thing being remembered. The days here that are nights, the solitude that is no longer chosen but simply the shape of my life, these are the materials. Not lesser than what came before. Just different. Just mine in a way that Handlová, for all its presence in my blood, can no longer fully be.
And the darkness remains. It has followed me faithfully, the one companion that does not distort with distance or dissolve with time. I still find comfort in it. Not fear. Not reverence. Just the quiet recognition of something that has always been there, asking nothing, offering nothing, and in that absence of demand, offering everything I need.
Sørarnøy Kirkegården, Sørarnøy, Norway, 2026
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