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Images Gone with Time

Introduction

[Book Overview]   [Index for Sample Pages]
   [Chapter One: HOME] 

The world you see before you no longer exists.

It is as if a lake has run dry and, by some strange chance, the image mirrored in its surface is all that remains. A reflection that lingers long after the object and the mirror are lost.

An image gone with time.

The Slovak village: individual, independent and distinctive, an age-old enclave. Polished to a strikingly beautiful perfection by an unchanging existence, ancient and uninterrupted. The secret of the pebble in the river.

The village was a world unto itself and it was free. Little did it depend on the world outside its borders. Daily life went on heedless of provincial landowners and the larger community beyond its ken.

The Slovak village took care of itself. It grew grain, ground the grain into flour, baked the flour into bread. It made homespun woolens for garments, tanned leather for shoes and boots, fashioned wood into everything from spoons to cottages.

It turned to the outside world for paraffin to give it light, for salt and sugar to flavor its fare and for grease to oil the axles of its farm wagons.

Making a living was its strictly assigned duty. The sequence of tasks was dictated by the movement of the stars in the sky above its little world. Precisely as a ritual, the village followed the rules of an agricultural existence.

When a new homestead came into being, the first building to go up was a barn for the harvest and the cattle. Only after this was done could the husbandman turn his attention to the task of building the family dwelling.

Duty was first and foremost. Nature ruled it--sometimes kindly, sometimes sternly, and occasionally cruelly. Nevertheless, within these boundaries was an inner freedom that is now quite impossible to comprehend. After all, our time is bartered against the demands made on it; the demands of the village folk were modest.

Thus was formed the distinctive character of the folk way of life which inevitably left its mark on everything created by heads and hands.

They labored like slaves--long and hard--but they sang as they worked.

This was their secret, as yet unrevealed in full. This book is an attempt to do so.

It knocks on the door of an ancient enclave. It comes to us as clearly as a radio signal on a calm day, clear as the water from a spring. It will draw us to it until our time fairly--and unfairly--makes fools of us.

Even a spring that has run dry can sometimes mirror our souls. Our human souls, our face within.

Milan Rufus

Book
9½ x 11, 150 pp. (2000)
Deluxe hardbound, ISBN 0-86516-436-3, $35.00 Order

Photographs
For information on how to purchase a print or exhibit these photographs, contact
the Slovak-American International Cultural Foundation, Inc.

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