LOVE, LIFE AND A LOVELY "EMPTY" NEST “What is it? What happened?” “Nothing, nothing,” she says. What do you mean nothing? You’re completely transformed.” “I slept very badly. I had almost no sleep. I’ve had a bad morning.” “A bad morning? Why?” “No reason, really no reason.” “Tell me.” “Really, no reason.” He insists. She finally says: “Men don’t turn to look at me any more.” MEN DON’T TURN TO LOOK AT ME ANY MORE. That sentence sets the tone for the brilliant novel Identity by the phenomenally talented Czechoslovakian writer Milan Kundera. The man, Jean-Marc, walks into the trap, poses as her secret admirer and starts writing some loving letters because she is his “sole emotional link to the world”. A foolish thought. Whoever understood their wives, anyway? The woman thinks him to be a stalker and finally when she discovers that her secret admirer is her husband, throws him out of his life. Milan Kundera goes on to say how “every woman measures how much she’s aged by the interest or uninterest men show in her body.” But Chantal, the protagonist of the novel, is not “every woman”, she has a mind of her own and clear about what she wants out of life. Sadly, she too falls prey to the multinational mindset that is sweeping everyone in its wake, including you and me. That aside, Kundera makes some brilliant observations on many aspects of our everyday life in this art-film like book. And you would definitely want to read them. Here are some of them: ON FRIENDSHIP: “Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. 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. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it. But I don’t care a damn about what I did in school! What I’ve always wanted, since my early adolescence, maybe even since childhood, was something else entirely: friendship as a value pried above all others. I like to say: between the truth and a friend, I always choose the friend.” ON MEN: “Men have daddified themselves, which means: fathers without a father’s authority.” ON EMPTINESS IN OUR LIVES: Chantal and Jean-Marc walk into a restaurant and observe “a couple plunged in a bottomless silence.” Says Jean-Marc to Chantal: “Look, it’s not that they hate each other. Or that apathy has replaced love. You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange. It’s just that their heads are empty.” If silence is one facet of human emptiness, then there is another side to it: people talk and talk without a stop. And Milan Kundera tells us why. “You know, Chantal, I really like those simple, ordinary phrases that are a kind of definition of a mystery. That “and that’s how the time goes by for him” is a fundamental line. Their problem is time – how to make time go by, go by on its own, by itself, with no effort from them, without their being required to get through it themselves, like exhausted hikers, and that’s why she (Jean-Marc’s aunt) talks, because the words she spouts manage inconspicuously to keep time moving along, whereas when her mouth stays closed, time comes to a standstill, emerges from the shadows huge and heavy, and it scares my poor aunt, who, in a panic, rushes to find someone she can tell how her daughter is having trouble with her child, who’s got diarrhoea, yes, Jean-Marc, diarrhoea, diarrhoea, she went to the doctor, you don’t know him, he lives not far from us, we’ve known him for quite a while now, yes, Jean-Marc, quite a while, he’s taken care of me too, this doctor, the winter I had that flu, you remember, Jean-Marc, I had a horrible fever…” ON BOREDOM: “I’d say the quantity of boredom, if boredom is measurable, is much greater today than it once was. Because the old occupations, at lease most of them, were unthinkable without a passionate involvement: the peasants in love with their land; my grandfather, the magician of beautiful tables; the shoemakers who knew every villager’s feet by heart; the woodsmen; the gardeners; probably even the soldiers killed with passion back then. The meaning of life wasn’t an issue, it was there with them, quite naturally, in their workshops, in their fields. Each occupation had created its own mentality, its own way of being. A doctor would think differently from a peasant, a soldier would behave differently from a teacher. Today we’re all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy towards our work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.” ON SECRETS: What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing everybody has: the body and its needs, its maladies, its manias – constipation, for instance, or menstruation. We ashamedly conceal these intimate matters not because they are so personal but because, on the contrary, they are so lamentably impersonal. ON CHANGE: “Well, our century has made one enormous thing clear: man is not capable of changing the world and will never change it. That is the fundamental conclusion of my experience as a revolutionary. A conclusion that is, incidentally, tacitly accepted by everybody. But there is another one, which goes further. This one is theological, and it says: man has no right to change what God has created. We have to follow that injunction all the way.” ON FEELINGS: “...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there’s no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.” ON PAIN “Pain doesn’t listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable.” ON FREEDOM: “Freedom? As you live your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. You’re free to melt your own individuality into the cauldron of the multitude either with a feeling of defeat or euphoria.” ON LOVE: “Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.” “They could be silent.” “Like those two, at the next table?” Jean-Marc laughed. “Oh, no, no love can survive muteness.” How true?
Posted on: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 06:38:19 +0000
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