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Aesthetic Racism Is Almost Always A Sign Of Inexperience. Those Who Have Not Made Their Way Far Enough Into The World Of Amorous Delights Judge Women Only By What Can Be Seen. But Those Who Really Know Women Understand That The Eye Reveals Only A Minute Fraction Of What A Woman Can Offer Us. When God Bade Mankind Be Fruitful And Multiply, Doctor, He Was Thinking Of The Ugly As Well As Of The Beautiful. I Am Convinced I Might Add, That The Aesthetic Criterion Does Not Come From God But From The Devil. In Paradise No Distinction Was Made Between Ugliness And Beauty.

-Milan Kundera

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Aesthetic Racism Is Almost

Milan Kundera

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Aesthetic Racism Is Almost Always A Sign Of Inexperience. Those Who Have Not Made Their Way Far Enough Into The World Of Amorous Delights Judge Women Only By What Can Be Seen. But Those Who Really Know Women Understand That The Eye Reveals Only A Minute Fraction Of What A Woman Can Offer Us. When God Bade Mankind Be Fruitful And Multiply, Doctor, He Was Thinking Of The Ugly As Well As Of The Beautiful. I Am Convinced I Might Add, That The Aesthetic Criterion Does Not Come From God But From The Devil. In Paradise No Distinction Was Made Between Ugliness And Beauty.

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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.

The Very Beginning Of Genesis Tells Us That God Created Man In Order To Give Him Dominion Over Fish And Fowl And All Creatures. Of Course, Genesis Was Written By A Man, Not A Horse. There Is No Certainty That God Actually Did Grant Man Dominion Over Other Creatures. What Seems More Likely, In Fact, Is That Man Invented God To Sanctify The Dominion That He Usurped For Himself Over The Cow And The Horse.

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We Pass Through The Present With Our Eyes Blindfolded. We Are Permitted Merely To Sense And Guess At What We Are Actually Experiencing. Only Later When The Cloth Is Untied Can We Glance At The Past And Find Out What We Have Experienced And What Meaning It Has.

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Living For Sabina Meant Seeing. Seeing Is Limited By Two Borders: Strong Light, Which Blinds, And Total Darkness. Perhaps That Was What Motivated Sabina's Distaste For All Extremism. Extremes Mean Borders Beyond Which Life Ends, And A Passion For Extremism, In Art And In Politics, Is A Veiled Longing For Death.

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The Basis Of Shame Is Not Some Personal Mistake Of Ours, But The Ignominy, The Humiliation We Feel That We Must Be What We Are Without Any Choice In The Matter, And That This Humiliation Is Seen By Everyone.

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Kitsch Causes Two Tears To Flow In Quick Succession. The First Tear Says: How Nice To See Children Running On The Grass! The Second Tear Says: How Nice To Be Moved, Together With All Mankind, By Children Running On The Grass!

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Children, Never Look Back!" And This Meant That We Must Never Allow The Future To Be Weighed Down By Memory . For Children Have No Past, And That Is The Whole Secret Of The Magical Innocence Of Their Smiles.

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Kitsch Excludes Everything From Its Purview Which Is Essentially Unacceptable In Human Existence.

Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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The Present Era Grabs Everything That Was Ever Written In Order To Transform It Into Films, Tv Programs; Or Cartoons. What Is Essential In A Novel Is Precisely What Can Only Be Expressed In A Novel, And So Every Adaptation Contains Nothing But The Non-essential. If A Person Is Still Crazy Enough To Write Novels Nowadays And Wants To Protect Them, He Has To Write Them In Such A Way That They Cannot Be Adapted, In Other Words, In Such A Way That They Cannot Be Retold.

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Nothing Yet. I've Been Waiting." "for What?" She Made No Response. She Could Not Tell Him That She Had Been Waiting For Him.

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The Longing For Order Is At The Same Time A Longing For Death, Because Life Is An Incessant Disruption Of Order.

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The Novel Is Not The Author's Confession; It Is An Investigation Of Human Life In The Trap The World Has Become

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Radio... Force-feeds Us Music... Everywhere And All The Time... Sewage-water Music In Which Music Is Dying.

So She Stood Naked In Front Of The Young Man And At This Moment Stopped Playing The Game.

Suspending Moral Judgment Is Not The Immorality Of The Novel; It Is Its Morality.

What's The Matter?" He Asked "nothing" "what Do You Want Me To Do For You?" "i Want You To Be Old. Ten Years Older. Twenty Years Older" What She Meant Was: I Want You To Be Weak. As Weak As I Am.

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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.

Those Who Consider The Devil To Be A Partisan Of Evil And Angels To Be Warriors For Good Accept The Demagogy Of The Angels. Things Are Clearly More Complicated.

In Eroticism As Dance: One Of The Partners Is Always Charged With Leading The Other.

Noise Has One Advantage. It Drowns Out Words.

Culture Is Perishing In Overproduction, In An Avalanche Of Words, In The Madness Of Quantity.

How Goodness Heightens Beauty!

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Humanity's True Moral Test, Its Fundamental Test…consists Of Its Attitude Towards Those Who Are At Its Mercy: Animals.

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A Man Able To Think Isn't Defeated - Even When He Is Defeated.

Immortality No Longer Interests The Weary Old Man At All.

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Ambition Is A Poor Excuse For Not Having Sense Enough To Be Lazy.

A Route Differs From A Road Not Only Because It Is Solely Intended For Vehicles, But Also Because It Is Merely A Line That Connects One Point With Another. A Route Has No Meaning In Itself; Its Meaning Derives Entirely From The Two Points That It Connects. A Road Is A Tribute To Space. Every Stretch Of Road Has Meaning In Itself And Invites Us To Stop. A Route Is The Triumphant Devaluation Of Space, Which Thanks To It Has Been Reduced To A Mere Obstacle To Human Movement And A Waste Of Time.

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Yes, It Was Too Late, And Sabina Knew She Would Leave Paris, Move On, And On Again, Because Were She To Die Here They Would Cover Her Up With A Stone, And In The Mind Of A Woman For Whom No Place Is Home The Thought Of An End To All Flight Is Unbearable.

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Love Is A Desire For That Lost Half Of Ourselves.

If I Hadn't Met You, I'd Certainly Have Fallen In Love With Him.

I Think I Am A Much Better Actor Than I Have Allowed Myself To Be.

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If Excitement Is A Mechanism Our Creator Uses For His Own Amusement, Love Is Something That Belongs To Us Alone And Enables Us To Flee The Creator. Love Is Our Freedom. Love Lies Beyond "es Muss Sein!

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Only Animals Were Not Expelled From Paradise.

Youth Is Terrible: It Is A Stage Trod By Children In Buskins And A Variety Of Costumes Mouthing Speeches They've Memorized And Fanatically Believe But Only Half Understand. And History Is Terrible Because It So Often Ends Up A Playground For The Immature; A Playground For The Young Nero, A Playground For The Young Bonaparte, A Playground For The Easily Roused Mobs Of Children Whose Simulated Passions And Simplistic Poses Suddenly Metamorphose Into A Catastrophically Real Reality.

Attaching Love To Sex Is One Of The Most Bizarre Ideas The Creator Ever Had.

Jealousy Has The Amazing Power To Illuminate A Single Person In An Intense Beam Of Light, Keeping The Multitude Of Others In Total Darkness.

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What Does It Mean To Live In Truth? Putting It Negatively Is Easy Enough: It Means Not Lying, Not Hiding, And Not Dissimulating.

Human Life Occurs Only Once, And The Reason We Cannot Determine Which Of Our Decisions Are Good And Which Bad Is That In A Given Situation We Can Make Only One Decision; We Are Not Granted A Second, Third, Or Fourth Life In Which To Compare Various Decisions.

Tereza's Mother Never Stopped Reminding Her That Being A Mother Meant Sacrificing Everything. Her Words Had The Ring Of Truth, Backed As They Were By The Experience Of A Woman Who Had Lost Everything Because Of Her Child. Tereza Would Listen And Believe That Being A Mother Was The Highest Value In Life And That Being A Mother Was A Great Sacrifice. If A Mother Was Sacrifice Personified, Then A Daughter Was Guilt, With No Possibility Of Redress.

But Then He Told Himself: What Does It Really Mean To Be Useful? Today's World, Just As It Is, Contains The Sum Of The Utility Of All People Of All Times. Which Implies: The Highest Morality Consists In Being Useless.

Draw A Line; Draw A Line That Pleases You. And Remember That It Is Not The Artist's Role To Copy The Outlines Of Things But To Create A World Of His Own Lines On Paper." (pp.28-29)

Let Us Consider The Critic, Therefore, As A Discoverer Of Discoveries.

The Young Man Called The Waiter And Paid. Then He Got Up And Said To The Girl: 'we're Going.' Where To?' The Girl Feigned Surprise. Don't Ask, Just Come On,' Said The Young Man. Is That Any Way To Talk To Me?' It's The Way I Talk To Whores.

While People Are Fairly Young And The Musical Composition Of Their Lives Is Still In Its Opening Bars, They Can Go About Writing It Together And Sharing Motifs (the Way Tomas And Sabina Exchanged The Motif Of The Bowler Hat), But If They Meet When They Are Older, Like Franz And Sabina, Their Musical Compositions Are More Or Less Complete, And Every Motif, Every Object, Every Word Means Something Different To Each Of Them.

Hate Traps Us By Binding Us Too Tightly To Our Adversary.

In The Political Jargon Of Those Days, The Word "intellectual" Was An Insult. It Indicated Someone Who Did Not Understand Life And Was Cut Off From The People. All The Communists Who Were Hanged At The Time By Other Communists Were Awarded Such Abuse. Unlike Those Who Had Their Feet Solidly On The Ground, They Were Said To Float In The Air. So It Was Fair, In A Way, That As Punishment The Ground Was Permanently Pulled Out From Under Their Feet, That They Remained Suspended A Little Above The Floor.

What I Love In A Woman Is Not What She Is In And For Herself, But The Side Of Herself She Turns Towards Me, What She Is For Me. I Love Her As Character In Our Common Love Story. What Wuld Hamlet Be Without The Castle At Elsinore, Without Ophelia, Without All The Concrete Situations He Goes Through, What Would He Be Without The Text Of His Part? What Would Be Left But An Empty, Dumb, Illusory Essence?

Any New Possibility That Existence Acquires, Even The Least Likely, Transforms Everything About Existence.

Being In A Foreign Country Means Walking A Tightrope High Above The Ground Without The Net Afforded A Person By The Country Where He Has His Family, Colleagues, And Friends, And Where He Can Easily Say What He Has To Say In A Language He Has Known From Childhood.

The Very Beginning Of Genesis Tells Us That God Created Man In Order To Give Him Dominion Over Fish And Fowl And All Creatures. Of Course, Genesis Was Written By A Man, Not A Horse.

A Gesture Cannot Be Regarded As The Expression Of An Individual, As His Creation (because No Individual Is Capable Of Creating A Fully Original Gesture, Belonging To Nobody Else), Nor Can It Even Be Regarded As That Person's Instrument; On The Contrary, It Is Gestures That Use Us As Their Instruments, As Their Bearers And Incarnations

But Man, Because He Has Only One Life To Live, Cannot Conduct Experiments To Test Whether To Follow His Passion (compassion) Or Not.

A Man Is Responsible For His Ignorance.

In Tereza's Eyes, Books Were The Emblems Of A Secret Brotherhood

Why Don't You Ever Use Your Strength On Me?" She Said. Because Love Means Renouncing Strength," Said Franz Softly.

Unbearable Lightness Of Being

All Previous Crimes Of The Russian Empire Had Been Committed Under The Cover Of A Discreet Shadow. The Deportation Of A Million Lithuanians, The Murder Of Hundreds Of Thousands Of Poles, The Liquidation Of The Crimean Tatars Remain In Our Memory, But No Photographic Documentation Exists; Sooner Or Later They Will Therefore Be Proclaimed As Fabrications.

Without The Meditative Background That Is Criticism, Works Become Isolated Gestures, Historical Accidents, Soon Forgotten.

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To Laugh Is To Live Profoundly.

I Feel A Frantic Desire To Free Myself. To Start All Over Again And In Another Way.

When The Heart Speaks, The Mind Finds It Indecent To Object.

No Episode Is A Priori Condemned To Remain An Episode Forever, For Every Event, No Matter How Trivial, Conceals Within Itself The Possibility Of Sooner Or Later Becoming The Cause Of Other Events And Thus Changing Into A Story Or An Adventure. Episodes Are Like Land Mines. The Majority Of Them Never Explode, But The Most Unremarkable Of Them May Someday Turn Into A Story That Will Prove Fateful To You.

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 ... Love Begins At The Point When A Woman Enters Her First Word Into Our Poetic Memory.

The Only Reason People Want To Be Masters Of The Future Is To Change The Past.

Is A Novel Anything But A Trap Set For A Hero?

And I Ran After That Voice Through The Streets So As Not To Lose Sight Of The Splendid Wreath Of Bodies Gliding Over The City, And I Realized With Anguish In My Heart That They Were Flying Like Birds And I Was Falling Like A Stone, That They Had Wings And I Would Never Have Any.

The Characters In My Novels Are My Own Unrealized Possibilities. That Is Why I Am Equally Fond Of Them All And Equally Horrified By Them. Each One Has Crossed A Border That I Myself Have Circumvented. It Is That Crossed Border (the Border Beyond Which My Own "i" Ends) Which Attracts Me Most. For Beyond That Border Begins The Secret The Novel Asks About. This Novel Is Not The Author's Confession; It Is An Investigation Of Human Life In The Trap The World Has Become.

When We Want To Give Expression To A Dramatic Situation In Our Lives, We Tend To Use Metaphors Of Heaviness. We Say That Something Has Become A Great Burden To Us. We Either Bear The Burden Or Fail And Go Down With It, We Struggle With It, Win Or Lose. And Sabina - What Had Come Over Her? Nothing. She Had Left A Man Because She Felt Like Leaving Him. Had He Persecuted Her? Had He Tried To Take Revenge On Her? No. 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.

Living Is Being Happy: Seeing, Hearing, Touching, Drinking, Eating, Urinating, Defecating, Diving Into The Water And Gazing At The Sky, Laughing And Crying.

It Was Futile To Attack With Reason The Stout Wall Of Irrational Feelings That, As Is Known, Is The Stuff Of Which The Female Mind Is Made.

From The Top Of The Staircase She Sees The London Train, Modern And Elegant, And She Tells Herself Again: Whether It's Good Luck Or Bad To Be Born Onto This Earth, The Best Way To Spend A Life Here Is To Let Yourself Be Carried Along, As I Am Moving At This Moment, By A Cheerful, Noisy Crowd Moving Forward.

A Constant Interrogation.

God Has Been Kind To Dogs In No Putting A Sense Of Beauty Into Their Heads.

Love Is A Battle, And I Plan To Go On Fighting. To The End.

Great Novels Are Always A Little More Intelligent Than Their Authors.

The River Flowed From Century To Century, And Human Affairs Play Themselves Out On Its Banks. Play Themselves Out To Be Forgotten The Next Day, While The River Flows On.

There Is A Certain Part Of All Of Us That Lives Outside Of Time. Perhaps We Become Aware Of Our Age Only At Exceptional Moments And Most Of The Time We Are Ageless.

And Therein Lies The Whole Of Man's Plight. Human Time Does Not Turn In A Circle; It Runs Ahead In A Straight Line. That Is Why Man Cannot Be Happy: Happiness Is The Longing For Repetition.

But When The Strong Were Too Weak To Hurt The Weak, The Weak Had To Be Strong Enough To Leave.

Mankind's True Moral Test, Its Fundamental Test (which Lies Deeply Buried From View), Consists Of Its Attitude Towards Those Who Are At Its Mercy: Animals. And In This Respect Mankind Has Suffered A Fundamental Debacle, A Debacle So Fundamental That All Others Stem From It.

There Would Seem To Be Nothing More Obvious, More Tangible And Palpable Than The Present Moment. And Yet It Eludes Us Completely. All The Sadness Of Life Lies In That Fact. In The Course Of A Single Second, Our Senses Of Sight, Of Hearing, Of Smell, Register (knowingly Or Not) A Swarm Of Events And A Parade Of Sensations And Ideas Passes Through Our Head. Each Instant Represents A Little Universe, Irrevocably Forgotten In The Next Instant.

Sad Company Is Bad Company.

Happiness Is The Longing For Repetition.

At A Time When History Made Its Way Slowly, The Few Events Were Easily Remembered And Woven Into A Backdrop, Known To Everyone, Before Which Private Life Unfolded The Gripping Show Of Its Adventures. Nowadays, Time Moves Forward At A Rapid Pace. Forgotten Overnight, A Historic Event Glistens The Next Day Like The Morning Dew And Thus Is No Longer The Backdrop To A Narrator's Tale But Rather An Amazing Adventure Enacted Against The Background Of The Over-familiar Banality Of Private Life.

She Regarded Books As The Emblems Of Secret Brotherhood. A Man With This Sort Of Library Couldn't Possibly Hurt Her.

My Lifelong Ambition Has Been To Unite The Utmost Seriousness Of Question With The Utmost Lightness Of Form.

Joking Is A Barrier Between Man And The World. Joking Is The Enemy Of Love And Poetry.

Anyone Whose Goal Is 'something Higher' Must Expect Someday To Suffer Vertigo. What Is Vertigo? Fear Of Falling? No, Vertigo Is Something Other Than Fear Of Falling. It Is The Voice Of The Emptiness Below Us Which Tempts And Lures Us, It Is The Desire To Fall, Against Which, Terrified, We Defend Ourselves.

Only The Most Naive Of Questions Are Truly Serious.

Questions And Answers

Just Imagine Living In A World Without Mirrors. You'd Dream About Your Face And Imagine It As An Outer Reflection Of What Is Inside You. And Then, When You Reached Forty, Someone Put A Mirror Before You For The First Time In Your Life. Imagine Your Fright! You'd See The Face Of A Stranger. And You'd Know Quite Clearly What You Are Unable To Grasp: Your Face Is Not You.

We All Reject Out Of Hand The Idea That The Love Of Our Life May Be Something Light Or Weightless; We Presume Our Love Is What Must Be, That Without It Our Life Would No Longer Be The Same; We Feel That Beethoven Himself, Gloomy And Awe-inspiring, Is Playing The “es Muss Sein!” To Our Own Great Love.

Flirting Is A Promise Of Sexual Intercourse Without A Guarantee.

If We Cannot Accept The Importance Of The World, Which Considers Itself Important, If In The Midst Of That World Our Laughter Finds No Echo, We Have But One Choice: To Take The World As A Whole And Make It The Object Of Our Game; To Turn It Into A Toy

Memory Does Not Make Films, It Makes Photographs.

You Think That Just Because It's Already Happened, The Past Is Finished And Unchangeable? Oh No, The Past Is Cloaked In Multicolored Taffeta And Every Time We Look At It We See A Different Hue.

The Idea Of Eternal Return Is A Mysterious One, And Nietzsche Has Often Perplexed Other Philosophers With It: To Think That Everything Recurs As We Once Experienced It, And That The Recurrence Itself Recurs Ad Infinitum! What Does This Mad Myth Signify?

Tereza Had Gone Back To Sleep; He Could Not. He Pictured Her Death. She Was Dead And Having Terrible Nightmares; But Because She Was Dead, He Was Unable To Wake Her From Them. Yes, That Is Death: Tereza Asleep, Having Terrible Nightmares, And He Unable To Wake Her.

The Girl Was Grateful To The Young Man For Every Bit Of Flattery; She Wanted To Linger For A Moment In Its Warmth And So She Said, 'you're Very Good At Lying.' 'do I Look Like A Liar?' 'you Look Like You Enjoy Lying To Women,' Said The Girl, And Into Her Words There Crept Unawares A Touch Of The Old Anxiety, Because She Really Did Believe That Her Young Man Enjoyed Lying To Women.

Oh Lovers! Be Careful In Those Dangerous First Days! Once You've Brought Breakfast In Bed You'll Have To Bring It Forever, Unless You Want To Be Accused Of Lovelessness And Betrayal.

The Only Relationship That Can Make Both Partners Happy Is One In Which Sentimentality Has No Place And Neither Partner Makes Any Claim On The Life And Freedom Of The Other.

Unbearable Lightness Of Being

The Novel Is A Meditation On Existence As Seen Through The Medium Of Imaginary Characters.

Now Time Has A Very Different Look; It Is No Longer The Conquering Present Capturing The Future; It Is The Present Conquered And Captured And Carried Off By The Past.

I Want You To Be Weak. As Weak As I Am.

If Our Planet Has Seen Some Eighty Billion People It Is Difficult To Suppose Hat Every Individual Has Had His Or Her Own Repertory Of Gestures. Arithmetically, It Is Simply Impossible. Without The Slightest Doubt, There Are Far Fewer Gestures In The World Than There Are Individuals. That Finding Leads Us To A Shocking Conclusion: A Gesture Is More Individual Than An Individual. We Could Put It In The Form Of An Aphorism: Many People, Few Gestures.

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.

What I Need Most Of All Is Certainty.

When Graves Are Covered With Stones, The Dead Can No Longer Get Out. But The Dead Can't Go Out Anyway! What Difference Does It Make Whether They're Covered With Soil Or Stones?

Isn't Beer The Holy Libation Of Sincerity? The Potion That Dispels All Hypocrisy, Any Charade Of Fine Manners? The Drink That Does Nothing Worse Than Incite Its Fans To Urinate In All Innocence, To Gain Weight In All Frankness?

The Beauty Of New York Is Unintentional; It Arose Independent Of Human Design, Like A Stalagmite Cavern.

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