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Milan Kundera -
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
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He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.
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The fact that until recently the word shit appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can't claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. … The aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. … Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
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None among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
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Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
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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.
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For the first few seconds, she was afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her rumbles, and she kissed him passionately, her eyes misting.
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We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.
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In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.
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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
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What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
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Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.
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But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
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When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
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Sabina's initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear — in other words, Communist kitsch.
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The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
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No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
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"Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."
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It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.
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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
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We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Milan Kundera
Creative Commons
Born:
April 1, 1929
Died:
July 11, 2023
(aged 94)
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