"They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and it's countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it."
-Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
"Sexual relations can take up the whole of adult life. But if that life were a lot longer, might not staleness stifle the capacity for arousal well before one's physical powers decline? For there is an enormous difference between the first and the tenth, the thousandth or the ten thousandth coitus. Where lies the boundary line beyond which repetition becomes stereotyped, if not comical or impossible? And once that boundary is crossed, what would become of the erotic relationship between a man and a woman? Would it vanish? Or, on the contrary, would lovers consider the sexual phase of their lives to be the barbaric prehistory of real love? Answering these questions is as easy as imagining the psychology of the inhabitants of an unknown planet."
-Milan Kundera (Ignorance)
"Yes, say what you will, the Communists were more intelligent. They had an imposing program. A plan for an entirely new world where everyone would find a place. The opponents had no great dream, only tiresome and threadbare moral principals, with which they tried to patch the torn trousers of the established order. So it's no surprise that the enthusiasts, the spirited ones, easily won out over the halfhearted and the cautious, and rapidly set about to realize their dream, that idyll and justice for all.
I emphasize: idyll and for all, because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere useless and meaningless black dot that need only be smudged out between thumb and finger like a flea.
There were people who immediately understood that they did not have the right temperament for the idyll and tried to go abroad. But since the idyll is in essence a world for all, those who tried to emigrate showed themselves to be deniers of the idyll, and instead of going abroad they went behind bars. Thousands and tens of thousands of others soon joined them, including many Communists like the foreign minister, Clementis, who had lent his fur hat to Gottwald. Timid lovers held hands on the movie screens, adultery was harshly suppressed by citizens' tribunals of honor, nightingales sang, and the body of Clementis swung like a bell ringing in the new dawn of humanity.
And then those young, intelligent, and radical people suddenly had the strange feeling of having sent out into the world an act that had begun to lead a life of it's own, and did not care about those who had created it. Those young and intelligent people started to scold their act, they began to call to it, to rebuke it, to pursue it, to give chase to it. If I were to write a novel about that gifted and radical generation, I would call it In Pursuit of an Errant Act. "
-Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
"A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the body. The body was a cage and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought, and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
Today, of course, the body is no longer unfamiliar: we know that the beating in our chest is the heart and that the nose is the nozzle of a hose sticking out of the body to take oxygen to the lungs. The face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the body mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration, thought.
Ever since man has learned to give each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble. He has also learned that the soul is nothing mare than the gray matter of the brain in action. The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice.
But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.
Tereza tried to see herself through her body. That is why, from girlhood on, she would stand before the mirror so often. And because she was afraid her mother would catch her at it, every peek into the mirror had a tinge of secret vice.
It was not vanity that drew her to the mirror; it was amazement at seeing her own "I". She forgot she was looking at the instrument panel of her body mechanisms; she thought she saw her soul shining through the features of her face. She forgot that the nose was merely the nozzle of a hose that took oxygen to the lungs; she saw it as the true expression of her nature.
Staring at herself for long stretches of time, she was occasionally upset at the sight of her mother's features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone. Each time she succeeded was a time of intoxication: her soul would rise to the surface of her body like a crew charging up from the bowels of a ship, spreading out over the deck, waving at the sky and singing in jubilation."
-Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
"If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings: neither his loves nor his friendships nor his angers nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours.
We will never cease our critique of those who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed."
-Milan Kundera (Ignorance)
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