"The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

[fiefoe]

I didn't get much out of the movie, but it turned out that the book is much much better at telling you what it's about. And it went down very smoothly too. Milan Kundera did say (something to the effect) that the best parts of a novel is usually the parts that translate best, but surely Michael Henry Heim deserves heaps of accolades as well.

(I should start compiling the batting average of 'classics', and see if it's indeed higher than I chronically expect.)

<Tomas's theme:>

• In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
• the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore cynically permitted.
• We can never known what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
• What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all.
• Permenides's magic field
• Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
• Dog time .. moves in a circle like the hands of a clock,... day in and day out following the same path.

• What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. . 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.
• This inability to be disappointed has something scandalous about it. The obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption (redemption by disappointment).
• In pursuit of knowledge, epic womanizers.. inevitably end up as curiosity collectors.
• He felt the joy of having acquired yet another piece of the world, of having taken is imaginary scalpel and snipped yet another strip off the infinite canvas of the universe.