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02c. 1976 AD
As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure. In front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated by a subordinate; in front of him a naked revolutionary was being humiliated by prayer; in front of him a praying lady was being humiliated by her nakedness.This threefold image of degradation intoxicated him and something unexpected suddenly happened: his body revoked its passive resistance. Edward was excited!As the directress said, 'And lead us not into temptation,' he quickly threw off all his clothes. When she said, 'Amen,' he violently lifted her off the floor and dragged her onto the couch.
Milan Kundera / quote
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04c. 1976 AD
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. From the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain.Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all other trace of other women. That was unfair, because the young woman he made love to on the rug during the storm was not a bit less worthy of poetry than Tereza. She shouted, ‘Close your eyes! Squeeze my hips! Hold me tight!; she could not stand it that when Tomas made love he kept his eyes open, focused and observant, his body ever so slightly arched above her, never pressing against her skin. She did now want him to study her. She wanted to draw him into the magic stream that may be entered only with closed eyes. [..] She wanted to merge with him. [..] 'It’s not sensual pleasure I’m after,’ she would say, 'it’s happiness. And pleasure without happiness is not pleasure.’ In other words, she was pounding on the gate of his poetic memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory. There was room for her only on the rug.
Milan Kundera / quote
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08c. 1976 AD
Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows in the gesture, notwithstanding any sadness the divers may actually feel. When someone jumps into the water fully clothed, it is another thing entirely: the only person who jumps into the water fully clothed is a person trying to drown; and a person trying to drown does not dive headfirst; he lets himself fall: thus speaks the immemorial language of gestures.
Milan Kundera / quote
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14c. 1976 AD
This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult "outside;" here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his "little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself.
Milan Kundera / quote
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15c. 1976 AD
But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to put his life on one of a pair of scales and death on the other. He wished each of his acts, indeed each day, each hour, each second of his life to be measured against the supreme criterion, which is death. That was why he wanted to march at the head of the column, to walk on a tightrope over an abyss, to have a halo of bullets around his head and thus to grow in everyone's eyes and become unlimited as death is unlimited. . .
Milan Kundera / quote
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16c. 1976 AD
He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble. The presence of the girl was pathetic (a few caresses and a lot of meaningless words), but her absolute absence was infinitely grand; when he imagined a girl buried in a field, he suddenly discovered the nobility of pain and the grandeur of love. But it was not only the absolute but also bliss he was looking for in his dreams of death.
Milan Kundera / quote
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20c. 1976 AD
There comes a moment when the image of our life parts company with the life itself, stands free, and, little by little, begins to rule us. Already in The Joke: “I came to realize that there was no power capable of changing the image of my person lodged somewhere in the supreme court of human destinies; that this image (even though it bore no resemblance to me) was much more real than my actual self; that I was its shadow and not it mine; that I had no right to accuse it of bearing no resemblance to me, but rather that it was I who was guilty of the nonresemblance; and that the nonresemblance was my cross, which I could not unload on anyone else, which was mine alone to bear.”And in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “Destiny has no intention of lifting a finger for Mirek (for his happiness, his security, his good spirits, his health), whereas Mirek is ready to do everything for his destiny (for its grandeur, its clarity, its beauty, its style, its intelligible meaning). He felt responsible for his destiny, but his destiny did not feel responsible for him.
Milan Kundera / quote
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