How Prague cured me of my communism
Proust can keep his soggy madeleine. For me the word “Prague” is a trigger of memory like no other. It stirs me up like some plaintive half-heard tune, or the faint scent of lavender in sheets left folded for years. Evil news from Prague, in a stuffy August long ago, turned my world over completely. This was 1968, a year of wonders, none of them very nice, which will not easily leave my recollection. It was the year I joined a Trotskyist sect. It was the year I punched a man (in self-defense). It was the year I attended my first violent raucous demonstration, against the war in Vietnam, with the police horses thundering through the March mud in Grosvenor Square. A few weeks later Paris was full of tear gas and flying cobblestones, and how I wished I was there.
