Milan Kundera Identity Quotes

How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more

...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.

[B]ut pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable.

Remembering our past, carrying it around 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.

Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

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.

يمكن للمرء أن يلوم نفسه على عمل ، على كلمة تلفظ بها ، ولكن لا يستطيع أن يلوم نفسه على شعور ، لأنه بكل بساطة ، لا يملك أية سلطة عليه

At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border?

Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that's the world we've put the child into. The child makes us care about the world, think about it's future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoils, take its incurable stupidity seriously.

That is why she dislikes dreams: they impose an unacceptable equivalence among the various periods of the same life, a leveling contemporaneity of everything a person has ever experienced; they discredit the present by denying it its privileged status.

If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever.

She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.

اگر بلندپروازی نداشته باشی و تشنه موفق شدن و به رسمیت شناخته شدن نباشی در آستانه سقوط قرار میگیری

A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted only a few minutes in the parade. When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. “You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?” She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject.

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.

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.

They talk on about death, about boredom, they drink wine, they laugh, they have a good time, they are happy.

The eye: the window to the soul; the center of the face's beauty; the point where a person's identity is concentrated; but at the same time an optical instrument that requires constant washing, wetting, maintenance by a special liquid dosed with salt. So the gaze, the greatest marvel man possesses, is regularly interrupted by a mechanical washing action.

Leroy interrupted Chantal's fantasies: "Freedom? As you live our 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.

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.

He thought: that's certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That's how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them.

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 at this moment, by a cheerful, noisy crowd moving forward.

I’d say that the quantity of boredom, if boredom is measurable, is much greater today than it once was. Because the old occupations, at least 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 toward our work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.

Ni jedna ljubav ne može preživjeti u šutnji.

(...) the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost.

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.)

Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizeable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional attributes).

The crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It's the absolute death.

Anyhow, he asks himself, what is an intimate secret? Is that where we hide what's most mysterious, most singular, most original about a human being? Are her intimate secrets what make Chantal the unique being he loves? No. 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, it 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. How can he resent Chantal, for belonging to her sex, for resembling other women, for wearing a brassiere and along with it the brassiere psychology? s if he didn't himself belong to some eternal masculine idiocy! They both of them got their start in that putterer's workshop where their eyes were botched with the disjointed action of the eyelid and where a reeking little factory was installed in their bellies. They both of them have bodies where their poor souls have almost no room. Shouldn't they forgive that in each other? Shouldn't they move beyond the little weaknesses they're hiding at the bottom of drawers? He was gripped by an enormous compassion, and to draw a final lune under that whole story, he decided to write her one last letter.

Yes, they have. It was back when they still didn't know each other by name. In the great hall of a mountain lodge, with people drinking and chattering around them, they exchanged a few commonplaces, but the tone of their voices made it clear that they wanted each other, and they withdrew into an empty corridor where, wordlessly, they kissed. She opened her mouth and pressed her tongue into Jean Marc's mouth, eager to lick whatever she would find inside. This zeal of their tongues was not a sensual necessity but an urgency to let each other know that they were prepared to make love, right away, instantly, fully and wildly and without losing a moment.

Prijateljstvo je neophodno čovjeku za dobar rad pamćenja. Sjećati se svoje prošlosti, nositi je uza se, to je možda nužan uvjet da se sačuva, kako kažu, integritet svoga 'ja'. Da to 'ja' ne zakržlja, da sačuva svoj obujam, potrebno je zalijevati sjećanja kao cvijeće u loncu, a to zalijevanje traži stalan dodir sa svjedocima prošlosti, to jest s prijateljima. Oni su naše zrcalo; naše pamćenje; ništa ne tražimo od njih osim da s vremena na vrijeme osvjetlaju to zrcalo da bismo se u njemu mogli ogledati.

En vivant votre misère, vous pouvez être malheureuse ou heureuse. C'est dans ce choix que consiste votre liberté. Vous êtes libre de fondre votre individualité dans la marmite de la multitude avec un sentiment de défaite, ou bien avec euphorie. (...) notre seule liberté est de choisir entre l'amertume et le plaisir. L'insignifiance de tout étant notre lot, il ne faut pas la porter comme une tare, mais savoir s'en réjouir. (ch. 43)

Because people who decline organized leisure activities are deserters from the great common struggle against boredom, and they deserve neither attention nor helmets.

Her beauty, which struck him at the time, did not make her look younger than her age; he might sooner have said that her age made her beauty more eloquent.

Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn how to enjoy it.

Keep this in mind: it is our religion to praise life. The word "life” is the king of words. The king­word surrounded by other grand words. The word "adventure”! The word "future”! And the word "hope”! By the way, do you know the code name for the atomic bomb they dropped on Hiroshima? "Little Boy”! That's a genius, the fellow who invented that code! They couldn't have dreamed up a better one. Little boy, kid, tyke, tot - there's no word that's more tender, more touching, more loaded with future.

I never forgot that, because, though I was only a child, something seemed to become clear to me: this is existence as such confronting time as such; and that confrontation, I understood, is named boredom.

To where," added Leroy, "resides the answer to your question: why are we living? what is essential in life?" He looked hard at the lady. "The essential, in life, is to perpetuate life: it is childbirth, and what precedes it, coitus, and what precedes coitus, seduction, that is to say kisses, hair floating in the wind, silk underwear, well-cut brassieres, and everything else that makes people ready for coitus, for instance good chow - not fine cuisine, a superfluous thing no one appreciates anymore, but the chow everyone buys - and along with chow, defecation, because you know, my dear lady, my beautiful adored lady, you know what an important position the praise of toilet paper and diapers occupies in our profession. Toilet paper, diapers, detergents, chow. That is man's sacred circle, and our mission is not only to discover it, seize it, and map it but to make it beautiful, to transform it into song. Thanks to our influence, toilet paper is almost exclusively pink, and that is a highly edifying fact, which, my dear and anxious lady, I would recommend that you contemplate seriously.

However much he may tell her he loves her and thinks her beautiful, his loving gaze could never console her. Because the gaze of love is the gaze that isolates. Jean-Marc thought about the loving solitude of two old persons become invisible to other people: a sad solitude that prefigures death. No, what she needs is not a loving gaze but a flood of alien, crude, lustful looks settling on her with no good will, no discrimination, no tenderness or politeness - settling on her fatefully, inescapably. Those are the looks that sustain her within human society. The gaze of love rips her out of it.

Without asking her permission, someone is trying to intrude her life, draw her attention, in short, to bother her.

Erotizam je komercijalno dvosmislen, jer premda svi priželjkuju erotski život, svi ga također mrze kao uzrok svojih nesreća, frustracija, zavisti, kompleksa, patnji.

You were like flames that must dance and leap to exist at all.

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.

Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.

Întotdeauna m-a şocat ideea că un trup superb poate fi o fabrică de secreţii; ţi-am spus că nu suport să văd o fată suflându-şi nasul. Parcă te văd; te-ai oprit, m-ai privit fix şi mi-ai spus pe un ton straniu, ştiutor, convins, apăsat: Suflându-şi nasul? Mie îmi e destul să-i văd ochiul clipind, să văd mişcarea pleoapei peste cornee, ca să simt o silă aproape insuportabilă.

a small nation resembles a big family and likes to describe itself that way. In the language of the smallest European people, in Icelandic, the term for "family" is fjölskylda; the etymology is eloquent: skylda means "obligation"; fjöl means "multiple." Family is thus "a multiple obligation." Icelanders have a single word for "family ties": fjölskyldubönd: "the cords (bönd) of multiple obligations." Thus in the big family that is a small country, the artist is bound in multiple ways, by multiple cords. When Nietzsche noisily savaged the German character, when Stendhal announced that he preferred Italy to his homeland, no German or Frenchman took offense; if a Greek or a Czech dared to say the same thing, his family would curse him as a detestable traitor.

Anyhow, he asks himself, what is an intimate secret? Is that where we hide what's most mysterious, most singular, most original about a human being? Are her intimate secrets what make Chantal the unique being he loves? No. 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, it maladies, its manias

...behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.

[…] without much ardor but quite unmistakably, she was writhing her hips as if she were dancing. When he was very close, he saw' her gaping mouth: she was yawning lengthily, insatiably: the great open hole was rocking gently atop die mechanically dancing body. Jean-Marc thought: she’s dancing and she’s bored. He reached the seawall: down below, on the beach, he saw men with their heads thrown back releasing kites into the air. They were doing it with passion, and Jean-Marc recalled his old theory: there are three kinds of boredom: passive boredom: the girl dancing and yawning; active boredom: kite-lovers; and rebellious boredom: young people burning cars and smashing shop windows.

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.

Chantal se siente a salvo, porque la voz de Jean-Marc es la voz del amor, la voz cuya existencia había olvidado en aquellos momentos de desconcierto, la voz del amor que la acaricia y la relaja, pero para la que todavía no está preparada; como si esa voz llegara de lejos, de demasiado lejos; tendrá que escucharla aún durante bastante tiempo para creer en ella.

And do you know the story about Haydn’s head? They cut it away from the still-warm cadaver so some insane scientist could take apart the brain and pinpoint the location of musical genius. And the Einstein Story? He’d carefully written his will with instructions to cremate him. They followed his orders, but his disciple, ever loyal and devoted, refused to live without the master’s gaze on him. Before the cremation, he took the eyes of the cadaver and put them in a bottle of alcohol to keep them watching him until the moment he should die himself. That’s why I said that the crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It’s the only absolute death. And I don’t want any other. Jean-Marc, I want an absolute death.

Rekao bih da je količina dosade, ako se dosadu može izmjeriti, danas mnogo veća nego nekoć. Jer su nekadašnja zanimanja, barem velikim dijelom, bila nezamisliva bez strastvene predanosti: seljaci zaljubljeni u svoju zemlju; moj djed, čarobnjak lijepih stolova; postolari su znali napamet stopala svojih suseljana; šumari; vrtlari; pretostavljam da su tada čak i vojnici ubijali sa strašću. Pitanje smisla života nije se postavljalo, bilo je njima posve prirodno, u njihovim radionicama, njihovim poljima. Svako je zanimalnje stvorilo vlastiti način mišljenja, vlastiti način postojanja. Liječnik je razmišljao drugačije od seljaka, vojnik se ponašao drukčije od učitelja. Danas smo svi jednaki, ujedinjeni zajedničkom ravnodušnošću prema svom poslu. Ta ravnodušnost postala je strašću. Jednom velikom kolektivnom strašću našega doba.

Fully aware that life is too short for the choice to be anything but irreparable, he had been distressed to discover that he felt no spontaneous attraction to any occupation. Rather sceptically, he looked over the array of available possibilities: prosecutors, who spend their whole lives persecuting people; schoolteachers, the butt of rowdy children; science and technology, whose advances bring enormous harm along with a small benefit; the sophisticated, empty chatter of the social sciences; interior design (which appealed to him because of his memories of his cabinetmaker grandfather), utterly enslaved by fashions he detested; the occupation of the poor pharmacists now reduced to peddlars of boxes and bottles. When he wondered; what should I choose for my whole life's work? his inner self would fall into the most uncomfortable silence.

Rubens discovered a peculiar thing: memory does not make films, it makes photographs. What he recalled from any of the women were at most a few mental photographs. He didn't recall their coherent motions; he visualized even their short gestures not in all their fluent fullness, but only in the rigidity of a single second. His erotic memory provided him with a small album of pornographic pictures but no pornographic film. And when I say an album of pictures, that is an exaggeration, for all he had was some seven or eight photographs. These photos were beautiful, they fascinated him, but their number was after all depressingly limited: seven, eight fragments of less than a second each, that's what remained in his memory of his entire erotic life, to which he had once decided to devote all his strength and talent. I see Rubens sitting at a table with his head supported on the palm of his hand, looking like Rodin's Thinker. What is he thinking about? If he has made peace with the idea that his life has narrowed down to sexual experiences and these again to only seven still pictures, seven photographs, he would at least like to hope that in some corner of his memory there may be concealed some eighth, ninth, or tenth photograph. That's why he is sitting with his head leaning on the palm of his hand. He is once again trying to evoke individual women and find some forgotten photograph for each one of them.

Jean-Marc ergueu-se para ir buscar a garrafa de conhaque e dois copos. E, depois, de uma golada: - No fim da minha visita ao hospital, ele começou a contar recordações. Recordou-me aquilo que eu teria dito quando tinha dezasseis anos. Nesse momento compreendi o único sentido da amizade tal como hoje é praticada. A amizade é indispensável ao homem para o bom funcionamento da sua memória. Lembrar-se do passado, trazê-lo sempre consigo, é talvez a condição necessária para conservar, como se costuma dizer, a integridade do eu. Pare o eu não encolha, para que mantenha o seu volume, é preciso regar as recordações como as flores de uma vaso, e essa rega exige um contacto regular com testemunhas do passado, isto é, com amigos. Eles são o nosso espelho, a nossa memória; não se exige anda deles, apenas que de vez em quando puxem o lustro a esse espelho para que nos possamos mirar nele. Mas estou –me nas tintas para o que fazia no liceu! O que sempre desejei desde a primeira juventude, talvez desde a infância, foi algo completamente diferente: a amizade como um valor acima de todos os outros. Gostava de dizer: entre a verdade e o amigo, escolho sempre o amigo. Dizia-o por provocação, mas pensava-o a sério. Hoje sei que essa máxima era arcaica. Podia ser válida para Aquiles, o amigo de Pátroclo, para os mosqueteiros de Alexandre Dumas, até ao Sancho, que apesar dos desacordos era um verdadeiro amigo do seu amo. Mas já não o é para nós. Vou tão no meu pessimismo que hoje posso preferir a verdade à amizade.

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the contract to forget, he no longer remembered what he had said to F. three years before. Too bad for him. The memory might have alerted him, might have helped him see that his choice of medicine was wholly theoretical, made without the slightest self- knowledge. Thus he studied medicine for three years before giving up with a sense of shipwreck. What to choose after those lost years? What to attach to, if his inner self should keep as silent as it had before? He walked down the broad outside staircase of the medical school for the last time, with the feeling that he was about to find himself alone on a platform all the trains had left.

Through ecstasy, emotion reaches its climax, and thereby at the same time its negation (its oblivion). Ecstasy means being "outside oneself," as indicated by the etymology of the Greek word: the act of leaving one's position (stasis). To be "outside oneself" does not mean outside the present moment, like a dreamer escaping into the past or the future. Just the opposite: ecstasy is absolute identity with the present instant, total forgetting of past and future. If we obliterate the future and the past, the present moment stands in empty space, outside life and its chronology, outside time and independent of it (this is why it can be likened to eternity, which too is the negation of time). [...] Man desires eternity, but all he can get is its imitation: the instant of ecstasy. [...] Living is a perpetual heavy effort not to lose sight of ourselves, to stay solidly present in ourselves, in our stasis. Step outside ourselves for a mere instant, and we verge on death's dominion.

The method of addition is quite charming if it involves adding to the self such things as a cat, a dog, roast pork, love of the sea or of cold showers. But the matter becomes less idyllic if a person decides to add love for communism, for the homeland, for Mussolini, for Roman Catholicism or atheism, for fascism or anti-fascism. In both cases the method remains exactly the same: a person stubbornly defending the superiority of cats over other animals is doing basically the same thing as one who maintains that Mussolini was the sole saviour of Italy: he is proud of this attribute of the self and he tries to make this attribute (a cat or Mussolini) acknowledged and loved by everyone. Here is that strange paradox to which all people cultivating the self by way of the addition method are subject: they use addition in order to create a unique, inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for the added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness (so painfully gained) quickly begins to disappear.

It is precisely when their interior worlds change shape that Bezukhov and Bolkonsky are confirmed as individuals; that they surprise; that they make themselves different; that their freedom catches fire, and with it the identity of their selves; these are moments of poetry: they experience them with such intensity that the whole world rushes forward to meet them with an intoxicating parade of wondrous details. In Tolstoy, man is the more himself, the more an individual, when he has the strength, the imagination, the intelligence, to transform himself. By contrast, the people I see changing their attitude toward Lenin, Europe, and so on expose their nonindividuality. This change is neither their own creation nor their own invention, not caprice or surprise or thought or madness; it has no poetry; it is nothing but a very prosaic adjustment to the changing spirit of History. That is why they don't even notice it; in the final analysis, they always stay the same: always in the right, always thinking what, in their milieu, a person is supposed to think; they change not in order to draw closer to some essential self but in order to merge with everyone else; changing lets them stay unchanged. Another way of expressing it: they change their mind in accordance with the invisible tribunal that is also changing its mind; their change is thus simply a bet on what the tribunal will proclaim to be the truth tomorrow.

Да се откажеш от следването си не е неуспех. Аз се отказах от амбициите си. Изведнъж станах човек без амбиции. И като загубих амбициите си, веднага се озовах вън от света. При това нямах никакво желание да се намирам другаде. Още повече, че не ме заплашваше мизерия. Но ако нямаш амбиции, ако не си жаден за успех, за признание, ти се намираш на прага на падението. Аз съм се настанил там доста удобно. Но съм се настанил именно на прага на падението. Следователно не преувеличавам, като казвам, че съм от страната на просяка, а не на собственика на този великолепен ресторант, където ми е толкова приятно.

От търговска гледна точка еротиката е нещо двусмислено, защото всеки се стреми към еротичен живот, но и всеки го мрази като причина за бедите си, за усещането си, че е лишен от нещо, че желанията му са незадоволени, като причина за комплексите и страданията си.

… защо пък желанията на просяка да са по-недостойни за уважение от желанията на бизнесмена? Тъй като са безнадеждни, те са свободни и искрени, а това е неоценимо качество.

Те и двамата имат тяло, в което бедната им душа заема толкова малко място. Не трябва ли взаимно да си го простят? Не трябва ли да бъдат над жалките тайни, които крият в дъното на чекмеджетата си?

Il pensait à autre chose : voilà la vraie et seule raison d'être de l'amitié : procurer un miroir dans lequel l'autre peut contempler son image d'autrefois qui, sans l'éternel bla-bla de souvenirs entre copains, se serait effacée depuis longtemps.

In 1935, three years before his death, Edmund Husserl gave his celebrated lectures in Vienna and Prague on the crisis of European humanity. For Husserl, the adjective "European" meant the spiritual identity that extends beyond geographical Europe (to America, for instance) and that was born with ancient Greek philosophy. In his view, this philosophy, for the first time in History, apprehended the world (the world as a whole) as a question to be answered. It interrogated the world not in order to satisfy this or that practical need but because "the passion to know had seized mankind." The crisis Husserl spoke of seemed to him so profound that he wondered whether Europe was still able to survive it. The roots of the crisis lay for him at the beginning of the Modern Era, in Galileo and Descartes, in the one-sided nature of the European sciences, which reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mathematical investigation and put the concrete world of life, die Lebenswelt as he called it, beyond their horizon. The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl's pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, "the forgetting of being." Once elevated by Descartes to "master and proprietor of nature," man has now become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him. To those forces, man's concrete being, his "world of life" (die Lebenswelt), has neither value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start.

Mistaking the physical appearance of the beloved for someone else's. How often that's happened to him! Always with the same astonishment: does that mean that the difference between her and other women is so minute? How is it possible that he cannot distinguish the form of the being he loves most, the being he considers to be beyond compare?

But Jean-Marc was telling the truth: he did not remember. Besides, he was not even trying to search his memory. He was thinking about something else: this is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.

ความเจ็บปวดไม่ต้องการรับฟังเหตุผล มันมีเหตุผลที่ไม่สมเหตุสมผลของตัวเอง

hiçbir aşk suskunluğun üstesinden gelemez.

insandan insana geçen, elle tutulamaz, şiirsel bir gül kokusu değil, elle tutulur, şiirsellikten uzak ağız salgılarıdır, öyle ki, bunlar içlerinde barındırdıkları mikrop ordusuyla metresin ağzından âşığına, âşıktan onun karısına, karısından bebeğine, bebeğinden teyzesine, bir lokantada garson olan teyzesinden, çorbasının içine tükürdüğü müşterisine, müşteriden onun karısına, karısından âşığına ve ondan da daha başka birçok ağza geçer, böylelikle de her birimiz, birbirine karışan ve bizi tek bir salgı toplumu, ıslak ve birleşmiş tek bir insanlık haline getiren bir salgı denizine batarız.

He feels the touch of her hand on his cheek, or more precisely the touch of three fingertips, and the trace of it is cold, like after the touch of fog. Her caresses were always slow, calm, it used to seem to him that they were meant to prolong time. Whereas these three fingers laid briefly on his cheek were not a caress but a reminder. As if a woman snatched up by a storm, carried off by a wave, could muster just one fleeting gesture to say: ‘And yet I was here! I did pass through! Whatever happens, don’t forget me!

Ia sampai di talud laut; di bawah, di pantai, dilihatnya para lelaki dengan kepala mendongak sedang menaikkan layang-layang. Itu mereka lakukan dengan sepenuh perasaan, dan Jean-Marc teringat teori lamanya: ada tiga macam kebosanan: kebosanan pasif: gadis yang berdansa dan menguap itu; kebosanan aktif: para pecinta layangan itu; dan kebosanan yang memberontak: anak muda yang membakari mobil dan meremuk etalase toko.

Aduh, Jean-Marc, kamu bagaimana sih? Aku tidak pernah ketawa. Jangan lupa, aku punya dua wajah yang berbeda. Aku sudah tahu bagaimana cara mendapat kesenangan dan kenyataan itu, tapi bermuka dua tetap tidak gampang. Dituntut kerja keras, perlu disiplin!

Ya, aku bisa punya dua wajah, tapi tidak bisa keduanya kupakai berbarengan. Dengan kamu, aku memasang wajah haha-hehe dan serba meledek. Kalau lagi di kantor, kupakai wajah serius. Tugasku memeriksa lamaran dan biodata orang-orang yang cari kerja di kantor kami. Terserah padaku mau merekomendasi atau menolak mereka. Beberapa dari mereka, dalam suratnya mengungkapkan diri dalam pose yang sangat mutakhir, trendi, dengan segala macam ungkapan klise, dengan slogannya, dengan segala optimisme yang sesuai persyaratan. Tanpa perlu ketemu atau bicara dengan mereka pun aku sudah bisa benci pada mereka.

Persahabatan itu mutlak diperlukan orang, agar ingatannya bisa bekerja dengan baik.

Untuk memastikan bahwa diri tidak mungkret, mengerut, untuk menjamin bahwa diri tetap bertahan pada volumenya, ingatan harus disiram seperti pohon bunga dalam pot, dan untuk menyiram itu dibutuhkan kontak tetap dan teratur dengan para saksi masa silam, artinya, dengan teman dan sahabat. Teman dan sahabat adalah cermin kita; memori kita; kita tidak minta apa-apa pada mereka kecuali bahwa mereka mengelap-lap cermin itu dari waktu ke waktu supaya kita bisa melihat diri kita sendiri di situ.

Dia membuka mulutnya dan menekankan lidahnya masuk ke mulut Jean-Marc, penuh semangat menjilat apa pun yang ditemukannya di dalam situ. Kegigihan lidah-lidah mereka ini bukan kebutuhan sensual melainkan desakan kebutuhan untuk saling mengabarkan bahwa keduanya siap main cinta, segera, saat itu juga, tuntas dan liar tanpa kehilangan waktu sedetik pun saja. Lidah-lidah mereka tidak ada kaitannya dengan nafsu atau kesenangan, lidah-lidah itu adalah bentara, wartawan-wartawati. Kedua orang itu tidak ada yang punya keberanian untuk mengucapkan dengan lugas dan keras, "Aku ingin bersetubuh denganmu, sekarang juga, tanpa ditunda," maka mereka suruh lidah-lidah mereka jadi juru bicara.

Sebagai remaja, dulu, memang betul ia sering tersipu-sipu; ketika itu dia sedang di titik berangkat perjalanan fisiologis perempuan, dan tubuhnya sedang berubah menjadi benda yang membebaninya dan membuatnya malu. Sebagai orang dewasa, dia sudah lupa caranya tersipu-sipu. Kemudian hembusan panas mengabarkan padanya akhir perjalanan itu, dan sekali lagi dia malu akan tubuhnya. Dalam suasana rasa malu yang tergugah kembali, dia pun belajar lagi cara tersipu-sipu.

Dua orang yang saling cinta, sendirian, terpisahkan dari dunia, itu indah sekali. Tapi dengan apa mereka akan mengumpani percakapan intim mereka? Seberapa memuakkannya pun dunia, itu tetap mereka butuhkan supaya bisa ngobrol berduaan.

Chantal berpikir: aku sudah jadi idola erotik seorang pengemis. Alangkah terhormat! Lalu dia koreksi dirinya sendiri: mengapa birahi pengemis harus kurang terhormat daripada nafsu pebisnis? Justru karena nafsu birahi pengemis tidak bakalan kesampaian, dalam nafsu itu terkandung sesuatu yang tak ternilai harganya: birahi itu merdeka dan tulus.

Tak ada yang bisa dilihat lewat jendela sekarang, kereta api ada dalam terowongan, dan ia merasa sedang pergi jauh dari kakak iparnya, dari Jean-Marc, dari teropongan orang, dari dimata-matai, menjauhi kehidupannya, kehidupan yang begitu tertancapkan padanya, yang begitu terbebankan padanya; kata-kata "lenyap dari pandangan" mendadak terlintas di pikirannya, dan ia kaget waktu menyadari bahwa perjalanan menuju kelenyapan tidaklah muram, bahwa naungan bunga mawar mitologisnya perjalanan itu lembut mulus dan ceria.

And he thinks he understands why she never showed him the letters: she wanted to hear the murmur of the tree by herself, without him, because he, Jean-Marc, represented the abolition of all possibilities, he was the reduction (even though it was a happy reduction) of her life to one single possibility.

Ồ không, không một tình yêu nào sống được qua cái trò chơi im lặng.

Cái nhìn của tình yêu là cái nhìn đưa đến sự cô đơn

Et moi ? Et moi ? Moi qui te cherche sur kilomètres de plage, moi qui crie ton nom en pleurant et qui suis capable de courir après toi par toute la planète?

Nếu như cậu ấy liều lên tiếng bảo vệ anh giữa đám người độc ác và hung dữ đó thì có khi bản thân cậu ấy lại phải chuốc lấy mọi sự công kích, xung đột, phiền hà. Sao anh lại có thể đòi hỏi cậu ấy một bước đi như vậy được? Nhất là vì cậu ấy là bạn anh! Chính anh làm thế mới là không đúng kiểu tình bạn! […] – Nếu sự căm ghét giáng vào anh, nếu người ta trút hết mọi tội lỗi lên đầu anh, nếu anh bị vất cho thú dữ ăn thịt, anh có thể chờ đợi ở những người quen biết một trong hai phản ứng: một số hùa theo bầy thú đang cắn xé anh, số khác kín đáo làm ra vẻ không nghe khộng thấy gì, do đó anh vẫn có thể tiếp tục quan hệ với họ. Loại người thứ hai này – thận trọng, tế nhị – là bạn anh. Bạn theo nghĩa hiện đại của từ này. Mọi chuyện đó em đã biết rõ từ lâu, Jean-Marc ạ.

Vả chăng, thường là bao giờ cũng thế: giữa khoảnh khắc gặp nhau và khoảnh khắc anh nhận ra nàng là người mình yêu, có một khoảng cách cần vượt qua. Hồi họ lần đầu quen nhau, ở vùng núi, anh đã có cái may mắn được ngồi riêng với nàng hầu như ngay lập tức. Liệu anh có thể nhận ra nàng là tình yêu của mình không, nếu như trước cuộc gặp đầu tiên chỉ có hai người đó anh đã nhiều lần thấy nàng khi tiếp xúc cùng người khác? Liệu khuôn mặt nàng có làm anh xúc động và mê đắm, nếu như anh chỉ thấy khi nó đưa ra với cá đồng nghiệp, thủ trưởng và nhân viên? Anh không có câu trả lời cho các câu hỏi này.

Bí mật nhất ại là cái gì chung nhất, tầm thường nhất, lặp lại nhất và vốn có ở mọi người: cơ thể và những nhu cầu của nó, những bệnh tật và thói gàn của nó, chẳng hạn chứng táo bón hay kỳ kinh nguyệt, Và chúng ta xấu hổ che đậy các tiểu tiết thầm kín đó không phải vì chúng là cá biệt, mà ngược lại, vì chúng phi cá tính một cách thảm hại.

Hai sinh thể người yêu nhau chỉ biết có mình, tách khỏi toàn thế giới, đó tất nhiên là một cảnh tượng đẹp. Nhưng lấy gì nuôi các câu chuyện tâm tình tay đôi của họ? Dù thế giới này có đáng khinh đến mấy, họ cũng vẫn cần đến nó nếu như họ muốn có chuyện để nói. – Hoàn toàn có thể im lặng được cơ mà. – Như cái đôi ngồi bàn bên ấy à? Jean-Marc cười lớn. Ồ không, không một tình yêu nào sống được qua cái trò chơi im lặng.

behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.

ผู้หญิงทุกคนวัดระดับความแก่ชราของตัวเองจากความสนใจหรือไม่สนใจที่พวกผู้ชายแสดงออกต่อร่างกายของพวกเธอ

...เมื่อเผชิญกับความรู้สึกต่างๆ ไม่มีใครทำอะไรได้ พวกมันอยู่ที่นั่น และหลุดพ้นจากการตัดทอนทุกอย่าง เราอาจตำหนิการกระทำ ถ้อยคำที่เอ่ยออกไป เราไม่สามารถตำหนิความรู้สึก ง่ายๆ เพียงเพราะเราไม่มีอำนาจไปบังคับมัน

...ความเจ็บปวดไม่ต้องการรับฟังเหตุผล มันมีเหตุผลที่ไม่สมเหตุสมผลของตัวเอง

คุณไม่สามารถวัดความรักที่มีต่อกันของมนุษย์สองคนจากจำนวนถ้อยคำที่พวกเขากล่าวต่อกันได้

The old scholar was watching the noisy young people around him and it suddenly occurred to him that he was the only one in the whole audience who had the privilege of freedom, for he was old. Only when a person reaches old age can he stop caring about the opinions of his fellows, or of the public, or of the future. He is alone with approaching death and death has no ears and does not need to be pleased. In the face of death a man can do and say what pleases his own self.

Bolesť, ktorú pociťuje, nechce útechu, práve naopak, chce ranú len väčšmi rozjatriť a niesť ju tak, ako sa pred svetom znáša nespravodlivosť. Nemá trpezlivosť čakať na Chantalin návrat a vysvetliť jej nedorozumenie. V hĺbke srdca dobre vie, že by to bolo jediné rozumné správanie, ale bolesť nechce počúvať rozum, má svoj vlastný rozum, ktorý nie je rozumný. Jeho nerozumný rozum chce, aby Chantal pri návrate domov našla byt prázdny, bez neho, tak ako vyhlásila, že ho chce mať, aby tam mohla byť sama a bez špehovania.