Mark:

...You know, Andy, we all are losing. Each one of us is loosing. You and me, and Nate, and that actor, her friend, our favoured at a time, do you remember him? For years he has been a symbol of our generation, and suddenly - no one knows how and when - he aged. He isn't still old, but time surprised and overtook him, and he hadn't been prepared. His features have lost their sharpness, the skin became loose, and he commenced to look ridiculous. And, what's the worst, he lost his aggressive determination that had been building his image. And what about him now? Every day he tries to capitalize on his former fame, and his manners of a superstar plus his new look give in result a comical effect. He looks like a smiling old bag. He willingly appears in television, even if they don't ask him, playing a laid-back kind of guy, cool and relaxed, but in fact, he is devastated inside. The despair and void...

THE HOUSE TO BE KNOCKED DOWN

The drunkard:

The smell. The very sound of this word thrills me and I'm becoming anxious. In all my life the sense of smell has played one of the main parts in finding the truth about the world. As early as being a child, I felt as if crossing the threshold of the real world, when I was walking in the wet and dark streets of November. The streets were full of rotten brown leaves, stacked into heaps that had been smouldering for hours. The smoke trailed in the air, shrouding the town. Excited with the scent, I couldn't calm myself down.
On another occasion, we were walking with a group of friends, talking animatedly. Suddenly I lose contact with them because of the smell of the entrance hall we entered. In a fraction of a second I found myself in another dimension. The friends stared at me, surprised with the lack of contact, understanding nothing. I stood in front of them stupefied and focused on one thing: what was the smell?

Once, during the period of the martial law in Poland, when shops were empty and only sometimes you could get anything in them, I bought a little English soap packed in a carton box, I remember neither the name nor the brand. At home I unpacked the purchase, soaped my hands and put them to my face.

The experience was sudden and shocking. The scent of the soap evoked projections before my eyes. I found myself in the end of the fifties, on an August sunny Sunday morning during my summer holidays in the country. As far as the eye could see, white stool with a white bowl full of water stood in front of each house of the village. Sons of the farmers stood at them, stripped to the waist, washing themselves. Working for the mines in Silesia, they came back only for two days to take part in a dance at the firehouse. They were washing themselves, and then they were washing their motorcycles that stood near the stools. Nickel-plated parts of them sparkled in the sunlight and reflected the sky. For long I couldn't identify the smell. Only recently I discovered that it was the smell of the weeds overgrowing the stream.