The door opened with a one-silver coin, and when I locked it behind me, I first felt a certain warmth or the feeling that I was in good hands. I lay down without much thought on the tiles of the floor, using my backpack as a pillow. The cubicle was, of course, so small that one couldn't stretch out at all, so I curled up in a semicircle around the toilet, with my head resting against the back wall. The light in this rather spacious public restroom, very bright and white, stayed on all night and barely dimmed in the cubicle, which was open from the top but, the width of a child's foot, and from the bottom. Covered with a few clothes from my backpack, I tried to read Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks," which had somewhat puzzled me for a while, but suddenly the day before in Radeinthain they had captivated and excited me, especially towards the end when the dying person begins to reflect on the end in a completely light-hearted manner.

The most unexpected of the five "essays" by Nobel laureate Peter Handke focuses on the "restroom," in fact, in all its versions, from the toilet in the grandfather's farmhouse to the ornate lavatories of Japanese temples. Who would have expected that this master of introspection would someday turn attention to the most overlooked and sibling-less refuge of everyday life?

In this narrative by the Austrian author, the subject is not, of course, the events in the toilet, but the anatomy of instant departure from the burdensome throng and verbal diarrhea of people that sometimes leaves you speechless. Viewed through this lens, every restroom becomes a small utopia, a temporary refuge from the turmoil. It’s not about rejecting the world, but rather a conscious respite before one returns with new eloquence to this very inevitable world.