The Endless Sentence of Arrogance

In the voice of László Krasznahorkai about when obstetricians forget humility, medicine becomes commerce and birth becomes spectacle.

László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist often described as one of the most demanding and visionary writers of our time. His sentences stretch for pages without pause, winding through thought and observation like a river that refuses to end. His style feels hypnotic, dense, and relentless—what Susan Sontag called “a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast and visionary form of prose.” He writes about moral decay, hubris, and the collapse of meaning, yet his work is strangely beautiful, even spiritual.

To read Krasznahorkai is to surrender control. His language resists interruption, dissolving the boundaries between description, philosophy, and confession. It feels as if consciousness itself were speaking—unfiltered, unpunctuated, circling truth like a wounded bird that never lands.

In that spirit, the following piece imagines his voice turned toward modern obstetrics, where pride, greed, and denial of evidence become a kind of moral collapse. It is a meditation not about medicine itself, but about what happens when those entrusted with life forget the humility that life demands.

Imagining László Krasznahorkai:

They walk through the bright corridors of maternity wards as if these sterile walls were temples built for their glory and not for the trembling women whose bodies carry the infinite labor of creation they hold clipboards and talk in numbers but not in truths they speak of centimeters and contractions yet their words are hollow because they have long ceased to hear the breath of the patient before them they have become merchants of certainty selling illusions of control in a universe that is chaos dressed in scrubs they stand behind the monitors as if behind barricades guarded from humility guarded from doubt guarded from the quiet voice that says we do not command nature we serve her they have forgotten that evidence is not the enemy of experience but its compass and that the data they dismiss are not abstract points but the silent echoes of thousands of women who trusted them once and suffered for their arrogance and so they move from room to room blinded by the gleam of billing codes and bonuses their hands trained for procedure but not for patience their minds rehearsed in self-justification but empty of reflection they confuse intervention with salvation and time with value they imagine themselves scientists but fear the discipline of truth because truth demands restraint and restraint brings no applause they perform inductions not because the data require it but because the schedule allows it they prescribe without knowing they decide without listening they deliver without understanding that to deliver is not to extract but to witness they have become the priests of a false religion where evidence is inconvenient humility is weakness and compassion is inefficiency and yet the universe continues its quiet rebellion against them for every healthy mother who leaves the hospital is not proof of their mastery but of nature’s mercy and every complication they fail to foresee is a reminder written in pain that medicine without humility is a form of violence the patient’s chart becomes their scripture rewritten to erase doubt the cesarean becomes their creed justified by convenience and the operating room becomes their altar upon which risk is sacrificed to ego they have forgotten the ancient duty of the healer which was to hold knowledge not as a weapon but as a promise to do no harm and now their days pass like the ticking of a machine efficient relentless devoid of grace until one evening when the monitors fall silent and the chart remains open and for a moment they might feel it the unbearable weight of having confused power for wisdom and profit for purpose and if they do not stop then if they do not fall to silence then they will live the rest of their days in the illusion that birth is their accomplishment and not the universe’s brief forgiveness for their failure to see that every baby born alive is not proof of their success but an undeserved absolution they no longer recognize.