The unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera

Again it occurred to him that Tereza was a child put in a pitch-daubed bulrush basket and sent downstream. He couldn't very well let a basket with a child in it float down a stormy river! It the Pharaoh's daughter hasn't snatched the basket carrying little Moses from the waves, there would have been no Old Testament, no civilization as we now know it!

How many ancient myths begin with the rescue of an abandoned child!

If Polybus had not taken in the young Oedipus, Sophocles would not have written his most beautiful tragedy!

Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Tomas came to this conclusion : making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation ( a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).

she realized she had nothing but that miserable ticket, and the thought brought her nearly to tears. To keep her from crying, she talked too much and too loudly, and she laughed. And again he took her in his arms and almost at once and they made love. She entered a mist in which nothing could be seen and only her scream could be heard.

it was no sign, no moan, it was a real scream. she screamed so hard that Tomas had to turn his head away from her face, afraid that her voice so close to his ear could rupture his eardrum. The scream was not an expression of sensuality, Sensuality is the total mobilizations of the senses

Her screams aim to crippling the sense, preventing all seeing and hearing.

unintentional beauty

another way of putting it may be beauty by mistake.

before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing from a while by mistake.

beauty by mistake

the final phase in the history of beauty

love is a battle

and i plan to go on fighting

love is a battle

well i dont feel at all like fighting

and he left

the true story behind Beethoven's famous

Muss es sein? Es muss sein! motif

men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world.

the obsession of the former is lyrical : what they seek in women in themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by definition something that can never be found, they are disappointed again and again. The disappointment that propels them from woman to woman gives their inconstancy a kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental women are touched by their unbridled philandering.

The obsession of the latter is epic, and women see nothing the least bit touching in it; the man projects no subjective ideal on women, and since everything interests him, nothing can disappoint him. The inability to be disappointed has something scandalous about it. The obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people are lacking in redemption.

Because the lyrical womanizer always runs after the same type of woman, we even fail to notice when he exchanges one mistress from another. His friends perpetually cause misunderstandings by mixing up his lovers and calling them by the same name.

In pursuit of knowledge, epic womanizers and of course Tomas belonged in their ranks turn away from conventional feminine beauty, of which they quickly tire, and inevitably end up as curiosity collectors. They are aware of this and little ashamed of it, and to avoid causing their friends embarrassment, they refrain from appearing in public with their mistress.  

another way of formulating the question, is , is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower to death

Einmal ist keinmal

what happens but once might as well not have happened at all

History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

Once more, and with a nostalgia akin to love

several days later, he was struck by another thought, which i record here as an addendum to the preceding chapter: Somewhere out in space there was a planet where all people would be born again. They would be fully aware of the life they had spent on earth and of all the experience they had amassed here. And perhaps they was still another planet, where we would all be born a third time with the experience of our first two lives.

And perhaps they were yet more and more planets, where mankind would be born one degree (one life) more mature. That was Tomas version of eternal return.

Of course we here on earth can only fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man on these other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity within man's power? Can he attain it through repetition?

Only from  the perspective of such a utopia it is possible to use the concept of pessimism and optimism with full justification : an optimist is someone who things that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is  one who thinks otherwise.

one of Jules Vern's famous novels, a favorite of Thomas's in his childhood, is called Two Years on holiday, and indeed two year is the maximum.

Sabina continued to receive letters from her sad village correspondent till the end of her lift. Many of them would remain unread, because took less and less interest in her natvie land.

And s one day she composed a will in which she requested that her dead body be cremated and its ashes thrown to the winds. Tereza and Tomas had died under the sign of weight. She wanted to die under the sign of lightness. She would be lighter than air. As Parmenides would put it, the negative would change into the positive.

What remains of Tomas ?

An inscription reading HE WANTED THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH

What remains of Beethoven >

A frown, an improbable mane, and a somber voice intoning "Es muss sein!"

What remains of Franz?

An inscription reading  A RETURN AFTER LONG WANDERINGS.

And so on and so forth. Before we are forgotten,, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Kitsch is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word;kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

Why was the world idyll so important for Tereza ?

Raised as we are on the mythology of the Old Testament, we might say that an idyll is an image that has remained with us like a memory of Paradise : life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure . It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.

She did not wish to claim that they could love each other more. Her feeling was rather that , given the nature of the human couple, the love of man and women is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances ) in the love between man and dog, the oddity of human history probably unplanned by the Creator.

Human times does not turn in a circles; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man can not be happy; happiness is the longing for repetition.

Yes, happiness is the longing for repetition.

Thanks !
My new plan for 2013 is thinking what plan for 2013 :)
Still got some outstanding stuff for the exhibition needa wrap up
And then start to think what else I wanna do