Milan Kundera

I like Kundera also. I especially enjoyed a short story he wrote in the book "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting." In the short story, students are reading a story by Ionesco. In the story, the characters are wondering whether Rhinoceros can have three legs or something like that. The students begin to wonder whether a Rhinoceros can have three legs or whether a Rhinoceros needs four legs. They become so overwhelmed by the inability to answer the question that they cry while giving a presentation on Ionesco. As they are crying, they begin to dance and they turn into angels and fly away. I thought that was a beautiful story. That a Rhinoceros could have three legs and that the students could have wings and fly away. "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" was a miraculous little book although I think Saul Bellow discusses the problem with more depth. As we come to repeat more and more experience, the weight of the experience becomes heavier and heavier and it assumes a weight and meaning that detaches us from the experience and makes us reflect. At the same time, the experience of death is, as the experience of being given life is, an absolute experience that happens only once. So Milan Kundera concludes that we crave erotic experiences that are not so monotonously the same, but a little different each time as to escape from the weight of being on the one hand, and, on the other hand, we keep one true lover all our life, whether imaginary or real, to be present with us when we die. [%sig%]

Kundera is an inspiration

Peter Few writers could stir me in my youth as Milan. His Unbearable Lightness of Being is a masterpiece. To read it in Czech or Slovak is indeed a complete joy. The post-ironic humour the post-end of history laska, love, and laughter and loss ... Milos makes us realise that politicians and governments are us. The mirror of two faces, two coins, we are the governors and the governed ... Trojka of quotes by Drahy, Mily, Priceless, Milan: Future People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. Life and Living We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture. Mystics and Mysticism Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.