Tag: milan kundera

• “In languages that derive from Latin, "compassion” means we cannot look on coolly as other suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, “pity” (French, pitié; Italian, pietà, etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. To take pity on a woman" means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.

  That is why the word “compassion” generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.

  In languages that form the word “compassion” not from the root “suffering” but from the root “feeling,” the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion – joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, współzcuzie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.“ 

  – ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera

  August 28, 2012

  milan kundera, the unbearable lightness of being

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  “Unlike Parmenides, Beethoven apparently viewed weight as something positive. Since the German word schwer means both "difficult” and “heavy,” Beethoven’s “difficult resolution” may also be construed as a “heavy” or “weighty resolution.” The weighty resolution is at one with the voice of Fate (“Es muss sein!”); necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.

  This is a conviction born of Beethoven’s music, and although we cannot ignore the possibility (or even probability) that it owes its origins more to Beethoven’s commentators than to Beethoven himself, we all more or less share it: we believe that the greatness of man stems from the fact that he bears his fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders. Beethoven’s hero is a lifter of metaphysical weights.“

  – ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera

  August 23, 2012

  milan kundera, the unbearable lightness of being

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  “We can never know what to want, because, living only one life,, we can neither compare it with our previous lives or perfect it in our lives to come.

  Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone?

  There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. 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 like 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 for nothing, an outline with no picture.

  Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.“

  ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ by Milan Kundera

  August 22, 2012

  milan kundera, the unbearable lightness of being

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