Identity by Kundera

 

"Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends."

"[...] every one of us is immersed in a sea of salivas that blend and make us into one single community
of salivas, one humankind wet and bound together."

Never thought about saliva in that way- we are all connected by saliva 0_0...

"The child makes us care about the world, think about its future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoils, take its incurable stupidity seriously."

"But what a sorry fate, to be the soul of a body cobbled together so offhandedly, whose eye cannot do its looking without being washed every ten, twenty seconds! How are we to believe that the person we see before us is a free, independent being, his own master? How are we to believe that his body is the faithful expression of whatever soul inhabits it?"

We are limited by the functions of our bodies. We will be forever imposed by it.

Great interruption to the story- asking the reader: "At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie ? Where was the border? Where is the border?" And what is the significance in this? 


Okay so basically in the end this woman which didn't really know herself, is finally heart and soul devoted to the one she loved- a deeper love developed. She realized that what she had was enough- and didn't want anything more. And that her identity was found in this love- this is the only way she could be her natural self. 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's a sweet story- showing us that even we don't know who we are sometimes. That everything is flexible, and we adapt to different kinds of people, changing our faces as many times as it's convenient. Does that make us hypocritical? In the end- I don't think so- except that it's not real. And whether it's real is what matters to the individual (not to society). It affects you in the end. And I guess love helps to know ourselves, because someone loves you for who you are (even if you sometimes forget it). And they can always rekindle what you have forgotten (about yourself). This phrase: "Men don't look at me anymore." in the story is significant because she was thinking that maybe she didn't live enough as she should have. And maybe wanting some adventure... and not realizing that all she needed she already had. The point is not to have a stranger's gaze but your lover's- and it can be a difficult thing to learn (and probably more than once). 
Do we really know the one's we love? Or can do they always have the capability of surprising us and making us feel as if we have never known them at all?

The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges

I have been searching for this author far and wide- trying to remember his last name. I have read him once in a world literature class and only remembered the impression he made on me. Because I have extremely intellectual friends- he came back to revisit me. This story was absolutely genius.

"Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that is really happening is happening to me..."

When you boil it down yes- we can only experience the present.

"I talked with him for scarcely an hour, but during that hour he was Goethe. . ." 

Goethe is the ultimate symbol of genius.

"The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past." 

"The instructions to turn always to the left reminded me that such was the common procedure for discovering the central point of certain labyrinths." 

 "I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms... I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars." 

In which men can get lost in... 

"In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pen, he chooses-- simultaneously -- all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves proliferate and fork." 

We choose all possibilities at once.

"He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I untter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the most fascinating works I have read- about time. We exist in all possibilities and everything is flexible. One time I am your friend and yet another I am your enemy. 
The question I have is: What in us makes us constant throughout these different possibilities of us? 

--
Pdf- Translated by D.A.Y.