The last time I was on my way home, I was dreaming, as I always do. In a car or on a train, it is impossible not to dream, not to imagine all the things one might still do with one's life.

A wedding, for instance.

As soon as I finish building this one. No, better after I build the next one. Then I can start building the wedding! There has to be enough time to prepare everything properly. A wedding according to my most secret wishes is an undertaking of some magnitude. 

Such a wedding would last at least a week—ten days, preferably—and guests could come and go whenever they pleased.They could even turn around halfway home and come back, because only then would some of them realise all they were missing by having left the wedding.

Now, the place and the programme. Yes, the place and the programme. They would have to be absolutely extraordinary.

Italy?

Perhaps.

I would like the cypresses there, and the Renaissance. And the kind of programme I would want could only be put together by three people in the entire wide world. Thank God I know them well enough by now to talk them into creating it. And they would rejoice: O Adonai, this is exactly the kind of programme we want to make, because with a budget like this and a concept this magnificent, it practically makes itself.

What would happen at a wedding of mine?

Writing and reading, of course!

Above all. But I would also permit theatre, exhibitions, workshops for children—lots of workshops, so the parents could put their feet up and let their souls grow quiet. There would be proper beds and games for dogs, obviously. And after lengthy consultations with my three programme-making O Adonais, we would surely even find music that my sensitive ears could endure and my body delight in.

Everything would happen in countless languages, because the guests would come from many different countries, and the bride herself would want to hear it all in at least five, if not eight. Stages of various sizes would alternate with hiding places for introverts—special quiet zones and sleeping zones, whose precise workings I still need to think through, because I myself would want to spend most of my time in them.

By the time I arrive home, I am so replete with this glorious dreaming that I am not even sorry I will probably never have such a wedding. A place like the one I would want surely doesn't exist anyway. And, come to think of it, I don't have a groom either. I completely forgot about him while dreaming. My apologies, sir. Nor, for the moment, do I have the budget for such splendour, although year by year I am getting closer, at least.

At home, amid days full of peace in the garden, I almost forget about the wedding and rejoice in how much money I have saved and how wonderfully free I am. What an enormous good that is, I tell myself with satisfaction. 

But then, on my way to Prague, I get off one stop later and find myself at the Wallenstein Loggia. And there my wedding is!

I recognise it immediately by the hiding places for introverts, which work so perfectly that when I start disappearing into them, nobody even notices. People read there and write. There is music and theatre. There are exhibitions too, and a church, and the summit of Zebín, so picturesque.

And the Loggia?

Albrecht’s Loggia is the place.

An apparition in the landscape, hovering there, kept from ascending into heaven only by four long strands of linden crowns, tethering it tenderly to Jičín.

As the great to the small, as Mannerism to the present day, as art to kitsch.

As death to life.

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