Immortality

Highlights from: Immortality by Milan Kundera (32)

The memory of Father began to deliver her from the hatred that had possessed her. Little by little, the poisonous image of a man tapping his forehead disappeared and in its place a phrase came into her mind: I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.

There were paths in those forests, her father stood on one of them, smiling and inviting her to join him.

She opened the magazine again and said: ‘Ifyou put the pictures of two different faces side by side, your eye is struck by everything that makes one different from the other. But if you have two hundred and twenty-three faces side by side, you suddenly realize that it’s all just one face in many variations and that no such thing as an individual ever existed.’

Up to a certain moment our death seems too distant for us to occupy ourselves with it. It is unseen and invisible. That is the first, happy period of life

For Laura the body was sexual from the beginning, a priori, constantly and completely, by its very essence. To love someone meant for her: to bring him one’s body, to give him one’s body, just as it was, with everything, inside and out, even with its own time, which is slowly, sweetly, corroding it.
For Agnes the body was not sexual. It only became so in exceptional moments, when an instant of excitement illuminated it with an unreal, artificial light and made it desirable and beautiful. And perhaps it was precisely because of that, though nobody knew this about Agnes, that she was

There are two methods for cultivating the uniqueness of the self: the method of addition and the method of subtraction

We may ask ourselves why a person who loves a cat (or Mussolini) is not satisfied to keep his love to himself, and wants to force it on others. Let

I will therefore make my statement more precise: the power of the journalist is not based on his right to ask but on his right to demand an answer

Imagology! Who first thought up this remarkable neologism? Paul or I? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that this word finally lets us put under one roof something that goes by so many names: advertising agencies; political campaign managers; designers who devise the shape of everything from cars to gym equipment; fashion stylists; barbers; show-business stars dictating the norms of physical beauty that all branches of imagology obey.

Reality was stronger than ideology

Imagologues create systems of ideals and anti-ideals, systems of short duration which are quickly replaced by other systems but which influence our behaviour, our political opinions and aesthetic tastes, the colour of carpets and the selection of books just as in the past we have been ruled by the systems of ideologues.

something must have happened to his image. Something must have happened and he didn’t know what it was, and he’d never know. Because that’s how things are, and this goes for everyone: we will never find out why we irritate people, what bothers people about us, what they like about us, what they find ridiculous; for us our own image is our greatest mystery.

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other

Laura added, emphasizing each word: ‘She demands that whoever strokes her really concentrates on it. I, too, resent it when someone is with me but his mind is somewhere else.’

But because people in the West are not threatened by concentration camps and are free to say and write what they want, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone towards every­thing, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights. The world has become man’s right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speed limit the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street.

This was the new definition: to be absolutely modern means to be the ally of one’s gravediggers

forceful for being vague.
I take the liberty of maintaining that without the art of ambiguity there is no real eroticism and the stronger the ambiguity, the more powerful the excitement.

very physical and sensual: an eye full of tears, an eye that had suddenly become an opening into the body, one of those nine beautiful gates into a woman’s body of which Apollinaire sings in his famous poem, a moist opening covered by a fig-leaf ofdark glasses

Homo sentimentalis cannot be defined as a man with feelings (for we all have feelings), but as a man who has raised feelings to a category of value.

That’s nothing. You’ll have to wait at least another twenty or thirty years before you become fully aware that man is mortal, and be able to draw all the consequences from that realization

To be mortal is the most basic human experience and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn’t know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn’t even know how to be dead.’

Take time, for example. I long for an experiment that would examine, by means of electrodes attached to a human head, exactly how much of one’s life a person devotes to the present, how much to memories and how much to the future. This would let us know who a man really is in relation to his time. What human time really is. And we could surely define three basic types of human being depending on which variety of time was dominant

What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.’

Laura protested. She fought for the rights of the living against the unjustified demands of the dead. The face that will disappear tomorrow under the earth or into the fire does not belong to the future dead but purely and entirely to the living, who are hungry and need to eat the dead, their letters, their money, their photo­graphs, their old loves, their secrets.

What is unbearable in life is not being but being one’s self. The Creator, with his computer, released into the world billions of selves as well as their lives

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.
But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain

Not for an instant would he cease believing in his occupation’s total uselessness. At first this made him sad and he blamed himself for his amorality. But then he told himself: what does it really mean to be useful? Today’s world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: the highest morality consists in being useless.

For classical sculptors as well as for painters of later periods a beautiful face was imaginable only in its immobility

Laughter is a convulsion of the face and a convulsed person does not rule himself, he is ruled by something that is neither will nor reason. And that is why the classical sculptor did not express laughter. A human being who does not rule himself (a human being beyond reason, beyond will) cannotbe considered beautiful.

There is nothing more useless,’ Avenarius said, ‘than trying to prove something to idiots

Because all of them are eager for admiration and not for pleasure. For appear­ance and not for reality. Reality no longer means anything to anyone. To anyone. To my

The most wonderful thing about it is that he makes me feel ten years younger. Thanks to him I crossed out ten or fifteen bad years and I feel as if I had just returned to Paris from Switzerland and met him.’