Cracow A book for writing

Other cities live in the present or in the future. Cracow lives in the past alone, by forces drawn from it, with life stolen from it, life smouldering beneatch grey ash. Everything in Cracow is old: even youth blossoms more solemnly, seems less lasting, and diffuses more rapidly into the harmonious tone of the whole. Any newer building or freshened-up frontage stands out glaringly in old Cracow, on whose countenance chips, wrinkles, mosses and moulds are like scars carried off the historic battlefield of the ages.
Józef Ignacy Kraszewski

Neath Wawel hill my father had his workshop; vast and vaulted was that whitewashed chamber, alive with jostling crowds of long-dead figures.
The boy I then was stored up in his heart impressions later hewn into his art.
Pure sentiments at first, not the mind’s rigours, endowed my moulded clay forms with their timbre, which then grew up before me into giants:
as statues carved in limewood.