A Monk in Brno

The peas were not, as a matter of historical correction, his first love. That distinction belonged to fuchsias, which he had grown in the window of his childhood bedroom in Hynčice and which, owing to some defect of soil or devotion, produced a single white bloom among the expected purples in the autumn of his eleventh year. The white bloom died. He kept it pressed in a schoolbook for thirty years. The schoolbook is gone. The fuchsia, as a species, persists; it does not remember him, and th...