Free Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City by John Banville Page A

those rocks, those grains of clay; those atoms, those electrons, those nuclei; those quarks, those super-strings . . . think, and immediately you plunge headlong into the dizzying possibility of there being no level at which to stop. So it is with the past. Is history the big picture, or the minute details, the grand sweep or the dusty annals? Irish historians are engaged in a passionate debate between revisionists and traditionalists. Revisionists want a new interpretation of ancient pieties - perhaps, they suggest, the famines of the 1840s were not entirely the fault of Perfidious Albion, perhaps the 1916 Rising was not the glorious blood sacrifice we have always been told that it was - while the traditionalists, many of whom see historiography as a tool for nation building, insist on a kind of poeticised, nationalist version of our shared past. In theCemetery there is a special section, the Slavin, or Pantheon, built by the architect Wiehl in the early 1890s, overlooked by stylised statues of the 'Rejoicing Homeland' and the 'Mourning Homeland', and containing the remains of some fifty of the homeland's heroes, including the Art Nouveau painter Alfons Mucha and the musician Jan Kubelik. In monuments such as the Slavin we encounter a notion of the past far removed from that of the young Anthony Burgess's schoolboy friend who encouraged him to read the history plays of Shakespeare since they were all to do with 'fighting and fucking tarts'.
    The question I am addressing is the one that historian, tourist and essayist alike must grapple with: how and where to locate the 'real' Prague, if, indeed, such a singular thing may be said to exist. Those dead leaves that I remember beside the path on the heights ofwhat is there about them that makes them particular to the place? When I think of Golden Lane I see far more vividly the snow under my feet, compacted to clouded grey glass, the first time I walked there with the Professor, than I do the house where in the late autumn and winter of 1916 Kafka wrote the stories that would make up the collection A Country Doctor. The gloomy glories of St Vitus's Cathedral are no more than a shimmer at the edge of my memory compared to the uncanny clarity with which I recall one afternoon leaving the crowded building, with its gaggles of tourists following the upheld umbrellas and rolled newspapers of their tour guides, and walking down the unexpectedly desertedStreet and hearing my own footsteps ring on the cobbles with what seemed definite but inexplicable intent. I met no one in particular, saw nothing out of the ordinary, so why has the image of myself walking there lodged so stubbornly in my recollection? Was it that the fresh-cut white stone paving flags and bags of mortar stacked against the east wall of the cathedral reminded me of Sudek's great series of photographs of St Vitus's under reconstruction in the 1920s? I do not know, just as I cannot say for certain what is the true length of the coastline of Europe. All I know is that I can see myself there, can see the silver-and-pearl light of afternoon, the gleam on the cobbles, that Japanese man frowning at his map, a grubby dog trotting past on its way to something important. These are the things we remember. It is as if we were to focus our cameras on the great sights and the snaps when developed all came out with nothing in them save undistinguished but maniacally detailed foregrounds.
    If Prague is not place, is it people, then? Not the great sights but the great figures? The Emperor Charles IV (1316-78) in 1355 made Prague the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the 'Rome of the North', thus initiating the city's Golden Age, attracting artists and scholars from all over Europe, including the poet Petrarch. Charles, son of John of Luxembourg, the blind soldier who died at the Battle of Crecy - a blind soldier? - was elected King of Germany in 1347 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1355. He proceeded to shift power away from Italy and