"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" [.]

[fiefoe]

<Sentiment vs. Kitsch / Body & Soul:>

• a sentimental summary of an unsentimental story that was disappearing in the distance
• "The reason I like you," she would say to him (Tomas), "is you're the complete opposite of kitsch."
• The women were pleased at having thrown off the ballast of the soul - that laughable conceit, that illusion of uniqueness - to becomes one like the next.
• "On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth."
• We are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments.
• The daily defecation is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation.
• It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. {I'll hold 王小波 as its opposite.}
• The May Day ceremony drew its inspiration from the deep well of the categorical agreement with being.
• The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! <> It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
• Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

<Out of Eden:>

• "Man the cow parasite" is probably how non-man defines man in his zoology books.
• Mankind's true moral test.. 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.
• Now we are longtime outcasts, flying through the emptiness of time in a straight line.
• No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so.

<Misc:>

• 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 exchange motifs.
• We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak.
• The goals we pursue are always veiled.
• A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.
• Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity.
• .. the category of people who longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes; who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes; who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love; who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present;

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