beim bahnhof alexanderplatz - 04-10-04

From Mandelstam's The Noise of Time -

"I repeat - my memory is not loving but inimical, and it labors not to reproduce but to distance the past... Between me and the age there lies a pit, a moat filled with clamorous time, the place where a family and reminiscences of a family ought to have been. What was it my family wished to say? I do not know. It was tongue-tied from birth - but it had, nevertheless, something that it might have said."