Dževad Karahasan: The Ring of ahryar (excerpt in English)

The Ring of ahryar

Voices

Modern furniture lends itself quite wonderfully to moving from place to
place, so much so that one might suspect it was in fact mainly designed
for moving. Composed of parts linked to one another with couplers and
screws, it can be effortlessly dismantled, packed into simple packages,
carried someplace else and reassembled as if nothing had happened. Now
this dismantling and assembling is so simple, so consistently composed
of procedures which are a pure mechanical necessity, that it might quite
successfully console men burdened with the technical idiot complex. It
is impossible to lose one’s bearings when dismantling and assembling
modern furniture: all it takes is two hands, a screwdriver and a head to
look out from. The head does not need to think; indeed, it had better not
think while the furniture is being dismantled or assembled, for this task
follows the law according to which a raindrop, having set out towards
the ground, is bound to fall. It proceeds automatically, while the one who
proudly thinks of himself as the performer is nothing but the eye that
sees the screw, the hand that holds the screwdriver. That is why modern
furniture is so beneficial for idiots capable of burdening themselves with
the technical idiot complex. Life-saving even, perhaps.

Translated by Nada Grošelj
(source: Vilenica Almanac 2010)