The lesson Zweig teaches you is as beautiful as it is painful. „My today is so much different than all my yesterdays; I have risen and fallen so often, that sometimes I feel as if I have lived not just one but several lives. When I say, without thinking, ‘my life’, I often find myself instinctively wondering which life.” And: „But if we can salvage only a splinter of truth from the structure of its ruin, and pass it on to the next generation by bearing witness to it, we will not have lived entirely in vain.” Read it, and live as if yesterday and today were the only things you could really own.

Written in 1954 and only fully published in 1999 Tyrmand’s diary is not only an introduction to Warsaw, the way my generation imagines it, based on the photos of Tadeusz Rolke, Wajda’s and Polanski’s movies and accompanied by Komeda’s jazz – it’s a diary of a sensitive intellectual. Notes on life, relationships, artists’ struggles – and human ones too. This is what I think of Warsaw and how I experience it; what I think of Polish intellectual history and what I think of choices we’re facing every day – something that has not changed in almost 70 years – trying to figure out what matters in life, while strolling the streets of a city that once was, and isn’t anymore.