"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."
"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)."
"The weighty resolution is at one with the voice of Fate ( "Es muss sein!"); necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value."
"Apart from her consummated love for Tomas, there were, in the realm of possibility, an infinite number of "uncomisummated loves for other men."
It was just mere chance that she fell in love with him- he was one of the many possibilites.Once he realized that, once he realized the coincidences that made up their so called "love", he lost all compassion. "ES KOENNTE AUCH ANDERS SEIN".
Basically the first part of the book deals with the appreciation of moments that do NOT continue. Tomas faced the predicament of either preserving the memories and leaving them in the past or continuing this affair. In the end, he regrets not keeping it in the past because all of his memories were affected by the end. In my opinion- I don't know whether the whole "happenings/coincidence" thing works. Because isn't ANY meeting a culmination of factors? So then- what is REAL? If we would always have an alternative?
"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."
Such a REAL example!
So could one say that Tereza was an idealist? She seems to analyze every "chance" as a explanation of Fate. And here we have it: "She knew then (the birds of fortuity had begun alighting on her shoulders) that this stranger was her fate."
"He called to her in a kind voice, and Tereza felt her soul rushing up to the surface through her blood vessels and pores to show itself to him."
"They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life."
Here we have the answer to coincidences:
"It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."
Coincidences are what makes our life beautiful!
"What was screaming in fact was the naive idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of body and soul, banish perhaps even time."
"Anyone whose goal is "something higher" must expect some day to suffer vertigo. [...] It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
We know its inevitable doom- and yet we still want to fall down into it. Why is that?
"She was ready to dismiss the crew of her soul from the deck of her body;"
So the paradox here was that both her mother and Tomas see her as yet another body, while she has the on-going wish to be an individual- that her soul was different. And what her soul believed- this idealism, this fate- was something she was pushing to make come true. The body in itself is physical (material), and reality was that Tomas did not think of her the way she wanted him to. She tried to force fate to bend a certain way...
"She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo."
"Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and
where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood."
"But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."
"While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs..."
"The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us."
"The obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption (redemption by disappointment)."
"Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."
The same idea Dostoevsky ends with in his "Notes from the Underground":
"This is the image from which he was born. As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about."
"If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond
Es muss sein!'"
It's so sweet- even if he met his perfect soul mate- he would still leave it all for Tereza, because Tereza has an emotional effect on him- he loves her.
Very curious point about Stalin's son- he concludes that dying for one's country, (no matter which) is less honorable than dying for a metaphysical reason (the contrast between his position and why he died- because of shit. "when there was no longer any difference between sublime
and squalid, angel and fly, God and shit."
"Without shit (in both the literal and figurative senses of the word), there would be no sexual love as we know it, accompanied by pounding heart and blinded senses."
This is absolutely genius- simple and even ridiculous- but genius.
Kitsch- the denial of shit in the human existence Basically the "unacceptable". "kitsch is
a folding screen set up to curtain off death."
I love the comparison between the American senator and the Communist party: their smiles were the same.
"we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse."
"political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch."
Great example of anti-communistic KITSCH- with the actress and the singer. It was all for publicity.
"Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion."
"What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars."
That's good :)
"The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man."
Because he was not yet "man".
"Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength
and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms."
---
One of the best books I've ever read, definitely in the top 5. The honesty in this book is so refreshing, something one rarely is able to find. I don't want to talk too much about it- in fear of ruining it's meaning.
I only want to comment on the concept of lightness/heaviness. So basically from what I get from the book- the heaviness is positive because it makes us question ourselves and squirm under pressure- only then are we alive. "we believe that the greatness of man stems from the fact that he bears his
fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders." And yet this thing about changing negative to positive is very interesting. I myself don't know whether I fully understand it...
I want to leave off with: ES MUSS SEIN!!
"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)."
"The weighty resolution is at one with the voice of Fate ( "Es muss sein!"); necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value."
"Apart from her consummated love for Tomas, there were, in the realm of possibility, an infinite number of "uncomisummated loves for other men."
It was just mere chance that she fell in love with him- he was one of the many possibilites.Once he realized that, once he realized the coincidences that made up their so called "love", he lost all compassion. "ES KOENNTE AUCH ANDERS SEIN".
Basically the first part of the book deals with the appreciation of moments that do NOT continue. Tomas faced the predicament of either preserving the memories and leaving them in the past or continuing this affair. In the end, he regrets not keeping it in the past because all of his memories were affected by the end. In my opinion- I don't know whether the whole "happenings/coincidence" thing works. Because isn't ANY meeting a culmination of factors? So then- what is REAL? If we would always have an alternative?
"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."
Such a REAL example!
So could one say that Tereza was an idealist? She seems to analyze every "chance" as a explanation of Fate. And here we have it: "She knew then (the birds of fortuity had begun alighting on her shoulders) that this stranger was her fate."
"He called to her in a kind voice, and Tereza felt her soul rushing up to the surface through her blood vessels and pores to show itself to him."
"They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life."
Here we have the answer to coincidences:
"It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."
Coincidences are what makes our life beautiful!
"What was screaming in fact was the naive idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of body and soul, banish perhaps even time."
"Anyone whose goal is "something higher" must expect some day to suffer vertigo. [...] It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
We know its inevitable doom- and yet we still want to fall down into it. Why is that?
"She was ready to dismiss the crew of her soul from the deck of her body;"
So the paradox here was that both her mother and Tomas see her as yet another body, while she has the on-going wish to be an individual- that her soul was different. And what her soul believed- this idealism, this fate- was something she was pushing to make come true. The body in itself is physical (material), and reality was that Tomas did not think of her the way she wanted him to. She tried to force fate to bend a certain way...
"She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo."
"Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and
where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood."
"But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."
"While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs..."
"The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us."
"The obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption (redemption by disappointment)."
"Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."
The same idea Dostoevsky ends with in his "Notes from the Underground":
"This is the image from which he was born. As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about."
"If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond
Es muss sein!'"
It's so sweet- even if he met his perfect soul mate- he would still leave it all for Tereza, because Tereza has an emotional effect on him- he loves her.
Very curious point about Stalin's son- he concludes that dying for one's country, (no matter which) is less honorable than dying for a metaphysical reason (the contrast between his position and why he died- because of shit. "when there was no longer any difference between sublime
and squalid, angel and fly, God and shit."
"Without shit (in both the literal and figurative senses of the word), there would be no sexual love as we know it, accompanied by pounding heart and blinded senses."
This is absolutely genius- simple and even ridiculous- but genius.
Kitsch- the denial of shit in the human existence Basically the "unacceptable". "kitsch is
a folding screen set up to curtain off death."
I love the comparison between the American senator and the Communist party: their smiles were the same.
"we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse."
"political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch."
Great example of anti-communistic KITSCH- with the actress and the singer. It was all for publicity.
"Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion."
"What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars."
That's good :)
"The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man."
Because he was not yet "man".
"Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength
and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms."
---
One of the best books I've ever read, definitely in the top 5. The honesty in this book is so refreshing, something one rarely is able to find. I don't want to talk too much about it- in fear of ruining it's meaning.
I only want to comment on the concept of lightness/heaviness. So basically from what I get from the book- the heaviness is positive because it makes us question ourselves and squirm under pressure- only then are we alive. "we believe that the greatness of man stems from the fact that he bears his
fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders." And yet this thing about changing negative to positive is very interesting. I myself don't know whether I fully understand it...
I want to leave off with: ES MUSS SEIN!!
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