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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera Things that weigh on us: Memory and love "The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past." pg. 30, 31. "...every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract. O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal. In the first weeks of their love, it was decided between Karel and Marketa that Karel would be the unfaithful and Marketa would accept it, but that Marketa would have the right to be the better of the two and Karel would feel guilty toward her. No one knew better than Marketa how sad it is to be better. She was better, but only for lack of anything better." pg. 51. "It was an unbearable insult to become a corpse. One moment you are a human being protected by modesty, by the sacrosanctity of nakedness and intimacy, and then the instant of death is enough to put your body suddenly at anyone's disposal." pg. 236. "On the contrary, she was finally where she had wished to be: she had fallen far back to a time when her husband did not exist, when he was neither in memory nor in desire, and thus when there was neither weight nor remorse... ... A body whose every part was marked by Tamina's and her husband's love story had sunk into insignificance, and in that insignificance there was relief and repose." pg. 241, 242. "They were inviting the occupied country to forget the bitterness of history and indulge itself in enjoying life.... I think he wanted to tell me that there exists a primeval state of music, a state prior to its history, a state before the first questionings, before the first reflections, before the first games with motif and theme. That primeval state of music (music without thought) mirrors the human being's inherent stupidity." pg. 248. "It is dangerous to spend all one's time with Beethoven, just as all privileged positions are dangerous. Tamina had always been a bit ashamed of admitting she was happy with her husband. She was afraid of giving people a reason to hate her. ... The privilege of love was not only a paradise, it was also a hell. Life in love was constant tension, fear, agitation. She is here among children to gain, at last, the rewards of calm and serenity. Until now, her sexuality had been occupied by love (I say "occupied" because sex is not love but merely a territory love takes over), and it had therefore participated in something dramatic, responsible, serious. Here among children, in the kingdom of triviality, sexual activity has reverted to become what it had originally been: a small toy for the production of physical pleasure. Or to put it another way: sexuality freed from its diabolic ties to love had become a joy of angelic simplicity." pg. 249, 250. "For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles." pg. 257 "Forget your forgetting," says the young man. pg. 224. "You begin to liquidate a people... by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was." pg. 218. Listening and expressing oneself "The phrase 'It's absolutely the same with me, I...' seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others. The whole secret of Tamina's popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She submits to the forces occupying her ear, never saying: 'It's absolutely the same with me, I...'" pg. 110. "At the beginning of their time together, he had asked her (ten years older than she, he had already gotten some idea of human memory's wretchedness) to keep a diary that would record their life. She had resisted, declaring it would make light of their love. She loved him too much to admit that what she considered unforgettable could ever be forgotten... ...She of course managed to recollect a good many half-forgotten events and situations, but she had no idea in what part of the school notebook to enter them. The chronological order was irremediably lost." pg. 117. "That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the driver's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them." pg. 126. "Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: (1) an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities; (2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; (3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi is, moreover, right to say that looked at from outside, she hasn't experienced anything. The mainspring that drives her to write is just that absence of vital content, that void.)" pg. 127. "The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside." pg. 128. "Tamina will never know what those great birds came to tell her. But I know. They did not come to warn her, scold her, or threaten her. They are not at all interested in her. Each one of them came to tell her about itself. Each one to tell her how it had eaten, how it had slept, how it had run up to the fence and seen her behind it. That it had spent its important childhood in the important village of Rourou. That its important orgasm had lasted six hours. That it had seen a woman strolling behind the fence and she was wearing a shawl. That it had gone swimming, that it had fallen ill and then recovered. That when it was young it rode a bike and that today it had gobbled up a sack of grass. They are standing in front of Tamina and talking to her all at once, vehemently, insistently, aggressively, because there is nothing more important than what they want to tell her." pg. 145. "The episode of Banaka's pointing to his chest and crying because he did not exist reminds me of a line from Goethe's West-East Divan: 'Is one alive when other men are living?' Hidden within Goethe's question is the mystery of the writer's condition: By writing books, a man turns into a universe (don't we speak of the universe of Balzac, the universe of Chekhov, the universe of Kafka?), and it is precisely the nature of a universe to be unique. The existence of another universe threatens it in its very essence.... For everyone is pained by thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words." pg. 147. "They got into a conversation. What intrigued Tamina were his questions. Not their content, but the simple fact that he was asking them. My God, it had been so long since anyone had asked her about anything! It seemed like an eternity! Only her husband had kept asking her questions, because love is a continual interrogation. I don't know a better definition of love." pg. 223. "I understand Tamina's self-reproaches. When Papa died, I did the same. I could not forgive myself for asking him so little, for knowing so little about him, for allowing myself to lack him... A symphony is a musical epic. We might say that it is like a voyage leading from one thing to another, farther and farther away through the infinitude of the exterior world. Variations are also like a voyage. But that voyage does not lead through the infinitude of the exterior world. In one of his pensées, Pascal says that man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the abyss of the infinitely small. The voyage of variations leads into that other infinitude, into the infinite diversity of the interior world lying hidden in all things. ... That the infinitude of the exterior world escapes us we accept as natural. But we reproach ourselves until the end of our lives for lacking that other infinitude. We ponder the infinitude of the stars but are unconcerned about the infinitude our papa has within him. It is not surprising that in his later years variations became the favorite form for Beethoven, who knew all too well (as Tamina and I know) that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities." pg. 225-227. "Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge!" pg. 229. Litost "The student went swimming in the river one day with his girlfriend, a fellow student. She was athletic, but he was a very poor swimmer. He could not time his breathing properly and swam slowly, his head held tensely high above the surface. She was madly in love with him and tactfully swam as slowly as he did. But when their swim was coming to an end, she wanted to give her athletic instincts a few moments' free rein and headed for the opposite bank at a rapid crawl. The student made an effort to swim faster and swallowed water. Feeling humbled, his physical inferiority laid bare, he felt litost. He recalled his sickly childhood, lacking in physical exercise and friends and spent under the constant gaze of his mother's overfond eye, and fell into despair about himself and his life... Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery. One of the customary remedies for misery is love. Because someone loved absolutely cannot be miserable. All his faults are redeemed by love's magical gaze, under which even inept swimming, with the head held high above the surface, can become charming. Love's absolute is actually a desire for absolute identity: the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost." pg. 167, 168. "If our counterpart is the weaker, we find an excuse to hurt him, like the student hurting the girl who swam too fast. If our counterpart is the stronger, all we can do is choose circuitous revenge-the indirect blow, a murder by means of suicide." pg. 206. "The idea occurs to me in this connection that it is no accident the notion of litost originated in Bohemia. The story of the Czechs-an endless story of rebellions against the stronger, a succession of glorious defeats that launched their history and let to ruin the very people who had done the launching-is a story of litost. When in August 1968 thousands of Russian tanks occupied that amazing small country, I saw a slogan written on the walls of a town: 'We don't want compromise, we want victory!' You must understand, by then there was no more than a choice among several varieties of defeat, but this town rejected compromise and wanted victory! That was litost talking! A man possessed by it takes revenge through his own annihilation." pg. 207. Meaningful and Meaningless "But are tanks really more important than pears? As time went by, Karel realized that the answer to this question was not as obvious as he had always thought, and he began to feel a secret sympathy for Mama's perspective, which had a big pear tree in the foreground and somewhere in the distance a tank no bigger than a ladybug, ready at any moment to fly away out of sight. Ah yes! In reality it's Mama who is right: tanks are perishable, pears are eternal." pg. 41. "Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things (a Moscow-trained Marxist believing in horoscopes), make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil's domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficient relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness.) ...whereas the devil's laughter denoted the absurdity of things, the angel on the contrary meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good, and meaningful everything here below was." pg. 86, 87. "I wandered through the streets of Prague, rings of laughing, dancing Czechs swirled around me, and I knew that I did not belong to them but belonged to Kalandra, who had also come loose from the circular trajectory and had fallen, fallen, to end his fall in a condemned man's coffin, but even though I did not belong to them, I nonetheless watched the dancing with envy and yearning, unable to take my eyes off them." pg. 94. "All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise." pg. 268. "It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything -love, convictions, faith, history- no longer has meaning." pg. 281. "But there is also a third, a mysterious and disturbing category of women. These are women we liked and were liked by, but women we quickly saw we would never have, because in relation to them we were on the other side of the border." pg. 282. "His own gaze was much weaker than the gaze he felt on him, the dubious gaze of the board of examiners, which knew full well that he was repeating himself and informed him that all repetition was mere imitation and all imitation was worthless." pg. 284. "The gaze of a man has often been described. It seems to fasten coldly on the woman, as if it were measuring, weighing, evaluating, choosing her, as if, in other words, it were turning her into a thing. Less well known is that a woman is not entirely defenseless against that gaze. If she is turned into a thing, then she watches the man with the gaze of a thing. It is as if a hammer suddenly had eyes and watched the carpenter grip it to drive in a nail. Seeing the hammer's malicious gaze, the carpenter loses his self-confidence and hits his thumb. The carpenter is the hammer's master, yet it is the hammer that has the advantage over the carpenter, because a tool knows exactly how it should be handled, while the one who handles it can only know approximately how." pg. 285, 286. "Jan had never shared Passer's admiration for things changing, but he liked his desire for change, seeing it as mankind's oldest desire, humanity's most conservative conservatism." pg. 294. "When things are repeated, they lose a fraction of their meaning. Or more exactly, they lose, drop by drop, the vital strength that gives them their illusory meaning. For Jan, therefore, the border is the maximum acceptable dose of repetitions. ... I am certain, on the contrary, that the border is constantly with us, irrespective of time and our stage of life, that it is omnipresent, even though circumstances might make it more or less visible... ...It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly, and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense. ... Jan had friends who like him had left their old homeland and who devoted all their time to the struggle for its lost freedom. All of them had sometimes felt that the bond tying them to their country was just an illusion and that only enduring habit kept them prepared to die for something they did not care about. They all knew that feeling and at the same time were afraid of knowing it, they turned their heads away for fear of seeing the border and stumbling (lured by vertigo as by an abyss) across it to the other side, where the language of their tortured people makes a noise as trivial as the twittering of birds." pg. 296, 297.
Copyright © August 6, 2005 |
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