Ignorance Milan Kundera
While reading "The Bastard of Istanbul" I was introduced to Milan Kundera. He was the favourite author of one of the character in the novel. Yesterday when I went to the book store to get something to read I decided to give Kundera a shot. I couldn't find any of his bestsellers at the store so I bought "Ignorance" instead. I haven't been engrossed by a book to this extent in a very long time. The prose is very lyrical and remarkable.
Unless there's emotion love stretches like a desert where one can die of sadness. (Page 72)
It is so tiring, faithfulness that does not spring from true passion. (Page 82)
It is so tiring, faithfulness that does not spring from true passion. (Page 82)
There are so many lines in the book which stay in your head even after you have read the book. It is a very short book and I just finished it but I thought I'd post one of my favourite chapters from the book on the blog. The book comes highly recommended.
A human lifetime is 80 years long on average. A person imagines and organizes his life with that span in mind. What I have just said everyone knows, but only rarely do we realize that the number of years granted us is not merely a quantitative fact, an external feature (like nose length or eyes color), but is part of the very definition of the human. A person who might live, with all his faculties, twice as long, say 160 years, would not belong to our species. Nothing about his life would be like ours- not love, or ambitions, or feelings, or nostalgia; nothing. If after 20 years abroad an emigre were to come back to his native land with another 100 years of life ahead of him, he would have little sense of a Great Return, for him it would probably not be a return at all, just one of many byways in the long journey of his life.
For the very notion of homeland. with all its emotional power, is bound up with the relative brevity of our life, which allows us too little time to become attached to some other country, to other countries, to other languages.
Sexual relations can take up the whole of adult life. But if the life were a lot longer, might mot staleness stifle the capacity for arousal well before one's physical powers declined? For there is an enormous difference between the first and the tenth, the hundredth, the thousandth, or the ten thousandth coitus. Where lies the boundary line beyond which repetition becomes stereotyped, if not comical and even impossible? And once that boundary is crossed, what would become of the erotic relationship between man and a woman? Would it vanish? Or. on the contrary, would lovers consider the sexual phase of their lives to be the barbaric prehistory of real love? Answering these questions is easy as imagining the psychology of the inhabitants of an unknown planet.
The notion of love (of great love, of one-and-only love) itself also derives, probably, from the narrow bounds of time we are granted. If that time were boundless, would Josef be so attracted to his deceased wife? We who must die so soon, we just don't know.
Chapter 34, Ignorance by Milan Kundera
For the very notion of homeland. with all its emotional power, is bound up with the relative brevity of our life, which allows us too little time to become attached to some other country, to other countries, to other languages.
Sexual relations can take up the whole of adult life. But if the life were a lot longer, might mot staleness stifle the capacity for arousal well before one's physical powers declined? For there is an enormous difference between the first and the tenth, the hundredth, the thousandth, or the ten thousandth coitus. Where lies the boundary line beyond which repetition becomes stereotyped, if not comical and even impossible? And once that boundary is crossed, what would become of the erotic relationship between man and a woman? Would it vanish? Or. on the contrary, would lovers consider the sexual phase of their lives to be the barbaric prehistory of real love? Answering these questions is easy as imagining the psychology of the inhabitants of an unknown planet.
The notion of love (of great love, of one-and-only love) itself also derives, probably, from the narrow bounds of time we are granted. If that time were boundless, would Josef be so attracted to his deceased wife? We who must die so soon, we just don't know.
Chapter 34, Ignorance by Milan Kundera
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