|
791e5f0
|
Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces. At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy. Was the last face the real one? No. They were all real: I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be. (I was frightened by the differences between one face and the next; none of them seemed to fit me properly, and I groped my way clumsily among them.)
|
|
youth
identity
man-of-many-faces
czech
masks
self
novel
|
Milan Kundera |
|
f279b1a
|
Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.
|
|
myth
history
past
czech
signs
decode
enigma
symbols
messages
forgetting
novel
|
Milan Kundera |
|
b31c32f
|
She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.
|
|
philosophy
czech
meaning-of-life
existentialism
novel
memory
|
Milan Kundera |
|
f7bffa4
|
"You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theaters: "We're happy, we're glad to be in the world, we're in agreement with being!" It's a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter "beyond joking." All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on the billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder." --
|
|
laughter
happiness
philosophy
czech
kitsch
meaning-of-life
existentialism
novel
|
Milan Kundera |
|
09da160
|
What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is a virtuous pretext by which man's hatred for man justifies its crimes.
|
|
czech
thanatos
totalitarianism
order
sinister
will
novel
|
Milan Kundera |
|
a93194d
|
How would I explain to him that I couldn't make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him?
|
|
hate
meaning
czech
definition
structure
enemy
peace
forgiveness
novel
evil
|
Milan Kundera |
|
f84c7f1
|
Their message will never be decoded... because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.
|
|
myth
history
past
czech
signs
decode
enigma
symbols
messages
forgetting
novel
|
Milan Kundera |
|
4ba9ebb
|
Musel jsem se divat na pruzory do plynovych komor a sam sledovat proces smrti... Znovu a znovu se me ptali, jak se ja a moji lide na tyto operace muzeme nepretrzite divat a jak jsme schopni to vydrzet. Ma stala odpoved znela, ze je to otazka zelezneho odhodlani, s jakym musime plnit Hitlerovy rozkazy, a takove odhodlani ze lze ziskat pouze potlacenim vsech lidskych citu.
|
|
czech
world-war-2
|
William Styron |