Nobody Will Laugh
"We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has."
"I lived like an eccentric who thinks that he lives unobserved behind a high wall, while all the time one detail escapes him: The wall is made of transparent glass."
And then your whole world collapses.
"All at once I understood that it had only been my illusion that we ourselves saddle events and control their course; the truth is that they aren't our stories at all, that they are foisted on us from somewhere outside; that in no way do they represent us; that we are not to blame for the strange paths they follow; that they are themselves directed from who knows where by who knows what strange forces."
If that is true, it is very convenient.
The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire
"When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd."
I didn't think about this before, that too much faith doesn't make things more real, but actually- the opposite.
"And because Martin is the knight obsessed by Necessity, he has transformed his love affairs into the harmlessness of the Game, without knowing it; so he continues to put his whole inflamed soul into them."
This is is a very comic story about the concept of the pursuit of a goal without wanting to achieve the goal itself. Like Kundera wrote, it was all "harmless" just because it was a Game, and therefore it could continue. If it was all too real, the fun would be taken out of it. That is why they feasted on the "idea" of what would happen, and not on the result (which never did happen). Like he said, "Will I stop playing the game just because it is futile?" Not at all. And in the end, the game wasn't about the women they conquered, but about the relationship they had with each other: Mark and the narrator. It was rather a play with each other, passing the ball back and forth. The women were the variable, while they were the constants.
The Hitchhiking Game
"In solitude it was possible for her to get the greatest enjoyment from the presence of the man she loved. If his presence had been continuous, it would have kept on disappearing. Only when she was alone was she able to hold on to it."
"Fiction was suddenly making an assault on real life. The young man was moving away from himself and from the implacable straight road, from which he had never strayed until now."
The power of fiction!
"[...]in fact, she smiled at the thought of how nice it was that today she was this other woman, this irresponsible, indecent other woman, one of those women of whom she was so jealous"
Maybe there is freedom in being someone else, and not having to deal with your real self and your insecurities...Interesting what the man thought, that we are in fact who we long to be all along. "Wasn't she becoming herself only through the game? Wasn't she freeing herself through the game? No, sitting opposite him was not a strange woman in his girl's body; it was his girl, herself, no one
else."
"[...] it had always seemed that the girl had reality only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds it simply didn't exist; beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point."
But isn't it unfair to attribute these concepts to a human being, and make them exist within these limits? Because then, the person begins to want to break these boundaries, precisely because they are so important for the relationship. For example, the girl knows that he loves her because she is pure, and that is why she is playing this game of the seductress- because she wants to be herself and cease to be a concept.
"It was as if he were looking at two images through the same lens, at two images superimposed one on the other with one showing through the other. These two images showing through each other were telling him that everything was in the girl, that her soul was terrifyingly amorphous, that it held faithfulness and unfaithfulness, treachery and innocence, flirta-tiousness and chastity. This disorderly jumble seemed disgusting to him, like the variety to be found in a pile of garbage."
Everything was within her- the bad and the good. And both had at the equal potential to show themselves.
---
What if they had never played this role? Then these "selves" within them would have never come out and expressed themselves, although they so much wanted to. They would have led a normal life, him worshipping her purity, and she staying pure while being insecure all the time. I think it is a good release, and sooner or later it would have come out in a different form. If not, she would have cheated on him with someone else, just so that she could prove to him (maybe she would be mad at him) that she was not chained to PURITY.
Symposium
"It is impossible to shake your tenacious desire to be flesh and nothing but flesh. Your breasts know how to rub against a man standing five meters away from you. My head is already spinning from those eternal gyrations your untiring butt describes when you walk. Go to the devil, get away from me! Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous—like God!"
Her boobs are ubiquitous (omnipresent). That's great.
"Perhaps I want to resist necessity. To trip up causality. To throw off the dismal predictability of the world's course by means of the free will of caprice."
"A man is responsible for his ignorance. Ignorance is a fault."
----
Kunder mentions the relationship between George Sand and Frederic Chopin and about how she was a virgin for 7 years while living with him. I didn't even know this!
This is what she says in a letter to a friend:
"For a long time now the disease which gnaws at the body and soul of this poor creature has been the death of me, and I see him fading away without ever having been able to do him any good, since it is his anxious, jealous and touching affection for me which is the main cause of his misery. For the last seven years I have lived like a virgin with him and other men. I have grown old before my time, but even so it cost me no effort or sacrifice, for I was so weary of passions and hopeless distEusionments. If ever a woman on this earth should have inspired him with absolute confidence I was that woman and he has never understood it. I am well aware that plenty of people accuse me, some of having exhausted him by the violence of my physical passion, others of having driven him to despair by my wild outbursts. I think you know the real state of affairs. He complains that I have killed him by refusing my consent, while I was absolutely certain that I should kill him if I acted otherwise. "
Kunder goes on to include:
"[...] she is so petrified by the anguish of love that she cannot make love with him. Elisabet,
can't you imagine that you could love someone so terribly that just because of it you couldn't go to bed with him?"
Just as George Sand "while I was absolutely certain that I should kill him if I acted otherwise. "
"A leak in nature is a religious ceremony, by means of which we promise the earth that in the end we'll return to it entirely." :)
"Look at me! I'm alive, at least! I'm not dying! For the time being I'm still alive! I'm alive!" and with these words her backside was no longer a backside, but grief itself, splendidly formed grief dancing around the room."
Don Juan and the Great Collector:
"Don Juan was a master, while the collector is a slave. Don Juan arrogantly transgressed
conventions and laws. The Great Collector only obediently, by the sweat of his brow, complies with conventions and the law, because collecting has become good manners, good form, and almost an obligation."
"What is the ugliness of a face compared with an emotion in whose greatness the absolute itself is mirrored?"
How egoistic of him to think that she tried to kill herself because of him- he is fully convinced that he was the reason. And now- come to think of it- why couldn't he love her? If she loves him? Because it strokes his ego and that's what he's truly after, especially after being rejected by the woman doctor. How wonderfully Kunder makes fun of Flajsman: "Flajsman sat gaping at Elisabet, because he hadn't expected such nobility: Elisabet didn't want to burden him with remorse, she didn't want to burden him with her love, and therefore she was renouncing it!" and "I think a man and a woman love each other all the more when they don't live together and when they know about each other only that they exist, and when they are grateful to each other for the fact that they exist and that they know they exist. And that alone is enough for their happiness. I thank you, dear Elisabet, I thank you for existing." Ha what a joke!
Beautiful and it ends with Flajsman having his "chest swell" with love for the woman doctor. How wittingly he portrayed the fickle poet! Nothing is noble and nothing is sacred for him if it doesn't feed his self-love.
"She absolutely escaped his imagination."
"Obviously he was experiencing that very short period (the paradisiac period) when the imagination is not yet satiated by experience, has not become routine, knows little, and knows how to do little, so that the unimaginable still exists; and should the unimaginable become reality (without the mediation of the imaginable, without that narrow bridge of images), a man will be seized by panic and vertigo."
Sometimes we are not ready for reality.
"This immediately struck her as a new corroboration of her conviction that the worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people."
"[...] if he then became disgusted with her and destroyed her monument in his thoughts, it made no difference because her monument was outside her, just as his thoughts and memory were outside her, and everything that was outside her made no difference."
We just have to put our ideas and monuments outside of ourselves in another person, so that they could never be changed or tarnished- no matter what happens to us.
So what are the reasons for their sleeping together? For him- she meant his past, what he had missed and the fact that things didn't change. If only he could have her, then he could have his past back again. For him it meant everything because all he saw in himself is that he was aging "the bald spot". For her- it meant a rebellion against her son, her as an invidiual. She did something she was forbidden to do, and broke the life she was condemned to live. She needed to be free from this martyrdom, which she herself explained to the man (as well as trying to explain to herself- to rationalize). And so, they needed each other, to fulfill each other's dreams to escape their own present disappointments. In this way, they could pretend to go back to the past, even for a second (they both knew they were going to be disgusted), just so they can live in the present.
" [...] while I, my dear friend, just as I am, naked, torn out of a legend, am going to vanish against the background of an implacably garish landscape and before the eyes of derisive, living youth."
"Vodka stinks of the Russian soul."
"You must understand that the pleasures of the body left only to its silence are tiresomely similar. In this silence one woman becomes like another and all of them are forgotten in all the others. And surely we throw ourselves into erotic pleasures above all in order to remember them. So that their luminous points will connect our youth with our old age by means of a shining ribbon! So that they will preserve our memory in an eternal flame!And take it from me, my friend, only a word uttered at this most ordinary of moments is capable of illuminating it in such a way that it remains unforgettable. They say of me that I'm a collector of women. In reality I'm far more a collector of words. Believe me, you'll never forget yesterday evening, and you'll be happy about that all your life!"
The power of words on memory.
"Now, however, the unpremeditated snare of false news had caused a split in the coherence of her being, and it seemed to Eduard that her ideas were in fact only a veneer on her destiny, and her destiny only a veneer on her body; he saw her as an accidental conjunction of a body, ideas, and a life's course, an inorganic structure, arbitrary and unstable. He visualized Alice (who was breathing deeply on his shoulder), and he saw her body separately from her ideas, he liked this body, its ideas seemed ridiculous to him, and this body and its ideas formed no unity; he saw her as an ink line spreading on a blotter: without contours, without shape."
He stopped respecting her because she forsook her principles for him.
"If you told him the whole truth and nothing but thev truth, only what you really thought, you would enter into a serious conversation with a madman you yourself would become mad. And it is the same way with the world that surrounds us. If I obstinately told the truth to its face, it would mean that I was taking it seriously. And to take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one's own seriousness. I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself."
About telling the truth.
" [...] and suddenly it seemed to him that, in fact, all the people he had met in this town were only ink lines spreading on a blotter, beings with interchangeable attitudes, beings without firm substance; but what was worse, what was far worse (it struck him next), was that he himself was only a shadow of all these shadow-characters;"
"[...] for even malicious imitation remains imitation, even a shadow that mocks remains a shadow, a secondary thing, derivative and wretched."
"GOD IS ESSENCE ITSELF"
"And that is why Eduard longs for God, for God alone is relieved of the distracting obligation of appearing and can merely be; for he alone constitutes (he alone, unique and nonexistent) the essential antithesis of this world, which is all the more existent for being unessential."
--
Kundera has such a healthy sense of humor. I very much enjoyed these stories.
"We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has."
"I lived like an eccentric who thinks that he lives unobserved behind a high wall, while all the time one detail escapes him: The wall is made of transparent glass."
And then your whole world collapses.
"All at once I understood that it had only been my illusion that we ourselves saddle events and control their course; the truth is that they aren't our stories at all, that they are foisted on us from somewhere outside; that in no way do they represent us; that we are not to blame for the strange paths they follow; that they are themselves directed from who knows where by who knows what strange forces."
If that is true, it is very convenient.
The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire
"When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd."
I didn't think about this before, that too much faith doesn't make things more real, but actually- the opposite.
"And because Martin is the knight obsessed by Necessity, he has transformed his love affairs into the harmlessness of the Game, without knowing it; so he continues to put his whole inflamed soul into them."
This is is a very comic story about the concept of the pursuit of a goal without wanting to achieve the goal itself. Like Kundera wrote, it was all "harmless" just because it was a Game, and therefore it could continue. If it was all too real, the fun would be taken out of it. That is why they feasted on the "idea" of what would happen, and not on the result (which never did happen). Like he said, "Will I stop playing the game just because it is futile?" Not at all. And in the end, the game wasn't about the women they conquered, but about the relationship they had with each other: Mark and the narrator. It was rather a play with each other, passing the ball back and forth. The women were the variable, while they were the constants.
The Hitchhiking Game
"In solitude it was possible for her to get the greatest enjoyment from the presence of the man she loved. If his presence had been continuous, it would have kept on disappearing. Only when she was alone was she able to hold on to it."
"Fiction was suddenly making an assault on real life. The young man was moving away from himself and from the implacable straight road, from which he had never strayed until now."
The power of fiction!
"[...]in fact, she smiled at the thought of how nice it was that today she was this other woman, this irresponsible, indecent other woman, one of those women of whom she was so jealous"
Maybe there is freedom in being someone else, and not having to deal with your real self and your insecurities...Interesting what the man thought, that we are in fact who we long to be all along. "Wasn't she becoming herself only through the game? Wasn't she freeing herself through the game? No, sitting opposite him was not a strange woman in his girl's body; it was his girl, herself, no one
else."
"[...] it had always seemed that the girl had reality only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds it simply didn't exist; beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point."
But isn't it unfair to attribute these concepts to a human being, and make them exist within these limits? Because then, the person begins to want to break these boundaries, precisely because they are so important for the relationship. For example, the girl knows that he loves her because she is pure, and that is why she is playing this game of the seductress- because she wants to be herself and cease to be a concept.
"It was as if he were looking at two images through the same lens, at two images superimposed one on the other with one showing through the other. These two images showing through each other were telling him that everything was in the girl, that her soul was terrifyingly amorphous, that it held faithfulness and unfaithfulness, treachery and innocence, flirta-tiousness and chastity. This disorderly jumble seemed disgusting to him, like the variety to be found in a pile of garbage."
Everything was within her- the bad and the good. And both had at the equal potential to show themselves.
---
What if they had never played this role? Then these "selves" within them would have never come out and expressed themselves, although they so much wanted to. They would have led a normal life, him worshipping her purity, and she staying pure while being insecure all the time. I think it is a good release, and sooner or later it would have come out in a different form. If not, she would have cheated on him with someone else, just so that she could prove to him (maybe she would be mad at him) that she was not chained to PURITY.
Symposium
"It is impossible to shake your tenacious desire to be flesh and nothing but flesh. Your breasts know how to rub against a man standing five meters away from you. My head is already spinning from those eternal gyrations your untiring butt describes when you walk. Go to the devil, get away from me! Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous—like God!"
Her boobs are ubiquitous (omnipresent). That's great.
"Perhaps I want to resist necessity. To trip up causality. To throw off the dismal predictability of the world's course by means of the free will of caprice."
"A man is responsible for his ignorance. Ignorance is a fault."
----
Kunder mentions the relationship between George Sand and Frederic Chopin and about how she was a virgin for 7 years while living with him. I didn't even know this!
This is what she says in a letter to a friend:
"For a long time now the disease which gnaws at the body and soul of this poor creature has been the death of me, and I see him fading away without ever having been able to do him any good, since it is his anxious, jealous and touching affection for me which is the main cause of his misery. For the last seven years I have lived like a virgin with him and other men. I have grown old before my time, but even so it cost me no effort or sacrifice, for I was so weary of passions and hopeless distEusionments. If ever a woman on this earth should have inspired him with absolute confidence I was that woman and he has never understood it. I am well aware that plenty of people accuse me, some of having exhausted him by the violence of my physical passion, others of having driven him to despair by my wild outbursts. I think you know the real state of affairs. He complains that I have killed him by refusing my consent, while I was absolutely certain that I should kill him if I acted otherwise. "
Kunder goes on to include:
"[...] she is so petrified by the anguish of love that she cannot make love with him. Elisabet,
can't you imagine that you could love someone so terribly that just because of it you couldn't go to bed with him?"
Just as George Sand "while I was absolutely certain that I should kill him if I acted otherwise. "
George Sand and Frederic Chopin painted by Eugene Delacroix
----
"But note this well, my dear Elisabet, love is connected far more loosely with what you
so incessantly think about than it might seem."
"A leak in nature is a religious ceremony, by means of which we promise the earth that in the end we'll return to it entirely." :)
"Look at me! I'm alive, at least! I'm not dying! For the time being I'm still alive! I'm alive!" and with these words her backside was no longer a backside, but grief itself, splendidly formed grief dancing around the room."
Don Juan and the Great Collector:
"Don Juan was a master, while the collector is a slave. Don Juan arrogantly transgressed
conventions and laws. The Great Collector only obediently, by the sweat of his brow, complies with conventions and the law, because collecting has become good manners, good form, and almost an obligation."
"What is the ugliness of a face compared with an emotion in whose greatness the absolute itself is mirrored?"
How egoistic of him to think that she tried to kill herself because of him- he is fully convinced that he was the reason. And now- come to think of it- why couldn't he love her? If she loves him? Because it strokes his ego and that's what he's truly after, especially after being rejected by the woman doctor. How wonderfully Kunder makes fun of Flajsman: "Flajsman sat gaping at Elisabet, because he hadn't expected such nobility: Elisabet didn't want to burden him with remorse, she didn't want to burden him with her love, and therefore she was renouncing it!" and "I think a man and a woman love each other all the more when they don't live together and when they know about each other only that they exist, and when they are grateful to each other for the fact that they exist and that they know they exist. And that alone is enough for their happiness. I thank you, dear Elisabet, I thank you for existing." Ha what a joke!
Beautiful and it ends with Flajsman having his "chest swell" with love for the woman doctor. How wittingly he portrayed the fickle poet! Nothing is noble and nothing is sacred for him if it doesn't feed his self-love.
"She absolutely escaped his imagination."
"Obviously he was experiencing that very short period (the paradisiac period) when the imagination is not yet satiated by experience, has not become routine, knows little, and knows how to do little, so that the unimaginable still exists; and should the unimaginable become reality (without the mediation of the imaginable, without that narrow bridge of images), a man will be seized by panic and vertigo."
Sometimes we are not ready for reality.
"This immediately struck her as a new corroboration of her conviction that the worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people."
"[...] if he then became disgusted with her and destroyed her monument in his thoughts, it made no difference because her monument was outside her, just as his thoughts and memory were outside her, and everything that was outside her made no difference."
We just have to put our ideas and monuments outside of ourselves in another person, so that they could never be changed or tarnished- no matter what happens to us.
So what are the reasons for their sleeping together? For him- she meant his past, what he had missed and the fact that things didn't change. If only he could have her, then he could have his past back again. For him it meant everything because all he saw in himself is that he was aging "the bald spot". For her- it meant a rebellion against her son, her as an invidiual. She did something she was forbidden to do, and broke the life she was condemned to live. She needed to be free from this martyrdom, which she herself explained to the man (as well as trying to explain to herself- to rationalize). And so, they needed each other, to fulfill each other's dreams to escape their own present disappointments. In this way, they could pretend to go back to the past, even for a second (they both knew they were going to be disgusted), just so they can live in the present.
" [...] while I, my dear friend, just as I am, naked, torn out of a legend, am going to vanish against the background of an implacably garish landscape and before the eyes of derisive, living youth."
"Vodka stinks of the Russian soul."
"You must understand that the pleasures of the body left only to its silence are tiresomely similar. In this silence one woman becomes like another and all of them are forgotten in all the others. And surely we throw ourselves into erotic pleasures above all in order to remember them. So that their luminous points will connect our youth with our old age by means of a shining ribbon! So that they will preserve our memory in an eternal flame!And take it from me, my friend, only a word uttered at this most ordinary of moments is capable of illuminating it in such a way that it remains unforgettable. They say of me that I'm a collector of women. In reality I'm far more a collector of words. Believe me, you'll never forget yesterday evening, and you'll be happy about that all your life!"
The power of words on memory.
"Now, however, the unpremeditated snare of false news had caused a split in the coherence of her being, and it seemed to Eduard that her ideas were in fact only a veneer on her destiny, and her destiny only a veneer on her body; he saw her as an accidental conjunction of a body, ideas, and a life's course, an inorganic structure, arbitrary and unstable. He visualized Alice (who was breathing deeply on his shoulder), and he saw her body separately from her ideas, he liked this body, its ideas seemed ridiculous to him, and this body and its ideas formed no unity; he saw her as an ink line spreading on a blotter: without contours, without shape."
He stopped respecting her because she forsook her principles for him.
"If you told him the whole truth and nothing but thev truth, only what you really thought, you would enter into a serious conversation with a madman you yourself would become mad. And it is the same way with the world that surrounds us. If I obstinately told the truth to its face, it would mean that I was taking it seriously. And to take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one's own seriousness. I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself."
About telling the truth.
" [...] and suddenly it seemed to him that, in fact, all the people he had met in this town were only ink lines spreading on a blotter, beings with interchangeable attitudes, beings without firm substance; but what was worse, what was far worse (it struck him next), was that he himself was only a shadow of all these shadow-characters;"
"[...] for even malicious imitation remains imitation, even a shadow that mocks remains a shadow, a secondary thing, derivative and wretched."
"GOD IS ESSENCE ITSELF"
"And that is why Eduard longs for God, for God alone is relieved of the distracting obligation of appearing and can merely be; for he alone constitutes (he alone, unique and nonexistent) the essential antithesis of this world, which is all the more existent for being unessential."
--
Kundera has such a healthy sense of humor. I very much enjoyed these stories.
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