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Home » More quotes from writer Milan Kundera

More quotes from writer Milan Kundera

The New Neo Posted on by

Long-time readers of this blog know that one of my favorite authors is Milan Kundera. Here are a few more Kundera quotes that offer food for thought:

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract. O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

This next one is about leaving the leftist circle dance, something that happened to Kundera:

That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles.

ADDENDUM: I noticed in the comments a couple of people mentioning the negative aspects of circle dancing. In previous posts I’ve covered what Kundera had to say about that, but I think it’s good to include those other Kundera quotes again, because they are so good and so tragic.

Here’s one:

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.

And here’s another:

…[T]he Communists…had an imposing program. A plan for an entirely new world where everyone would find a place. The opponents had no great dream, only some tiresome and threadbare moral principles, with which they tried to patch the torn trousers of the established order. So it’s no surprise that the enthusiasts, the spir­ited ones, easily won out over the halfhearted and the cautious, and rapidly set about to realize their dream, that idyll of justice for all. I emphasize idyll and for all, because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter.

There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere use­less and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea. There were people who immediately understood that they did not have the right temperament for the idyll and tried to go abroad. But since the idyll is in essence a world for all, those who tried to emigrate showed themselves to be deniers of the idyll, and instead of going abroad, they went behind bars. Thousands and tens of thousands of others soon joined them, including many Communists like the foreign minister, Clementis, who had lent his fur hat to Gottwald. Timid lovers held hands on the movie screens, adultery was harshly sup­pressed by citizens’ tribunals of honor, nightingales sang, and the body of Clements swung like a bell ring­ing in the new dawn of humanity.

And then those young, intelligent, and radical peo­ple suddenly had the strange feeling of having sent out into the world an act that had begun to lead a life of its own, had ceased to resemble the idea it was based on and did not care about those who had created it. Those young and intelligent people started to scold their act, they began to call to it, to rebuke it, to pur­sue it, to give chase to it.

ADDENDUM II: And that last paragraph, about trying to call back an act that’s regretted, reminds me of this post of mine about the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Goethe’s, “The spirits which I have summoned/I now cannot banish.”

Comments

More quotes from writer Milan Kundera — 18 Comments

  1. The “circle dance” unity, not unlike thousands at a rock concert singing along, is a very alluring desire.
    All in harmony.

    Unless one disagrees.

    Now I want to see again the movie “My dinner with Andre” – where there is good verbal description of what seems to be a Kundera like circle dance.

  2. The appeal of Circle Dancing, I think, explains why so many people are attracted to The Current Thing, whatever that thing may be.

  4. Tom Grey; david foster:

    Kundera has covered that aspect of circle dancing quite thoroughly. Here’s another quote:

    Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.

    As well as this:

    …[T]he Communists…had an imposing program. A plan for an entirely new world where everyone would find a place. The opponents had no great dream, only some tiresome and threadbare moral principles, with which they tried to patch the torn trousers of the established order. So it’s no surprise that the enthusiasts, the spir­ited ones, easily won out over the halfhearted and the cautious, and rapidly set about to realize their dream, that idyll of justice for all. I emphasize idyll and for all, because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter.

    There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere use­less and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea. There were people who immediately understood that they did not have the right temperament for the idyll and tried to go abroad. But since the idyll is in essence a world for all, those who tried to emigrate showed themselves to be deniers of the idyll, and instead of going abroad, they went behind bars. Thousands and tens of thousands of others soon joined them, including many Communists like the foreign minister, Clementis, who had lent his fur hat to Gottwald. Timid lovers held hands on the movie screens, adultery was harshly sup­pressed by citizens’ tribunals of honor, nightingales sang, and the body of Clements swung like a bell ring­ing in the new dawn of humanity.

    And then those young, intelligent, and radical peo­ple suddenly had the strange feeling of having sent out into the world an act that had begun to lead a life of its own, had ceased to resemble the idea it was based on and did not care about those who had created it. Those young and intelligent people started to scold their act, they began to call to it, to rebuke it, to pur­sue it, to give chase to it.

  5. Robespierre, the mass executioner of the French Revolution, was in his early life a judge in a criminal court in Arras. He resigned, because of his discomfort of ruling on capital cases.

    Melitta Maschmann, a German woman who rose fairly high in the Nazi hierarchy, was originally attracted to the Nazi movement because she felt the movement was sympathetic to the poor, in contrast with her mother’s snobbish disregard for such people.

    So often, idealism turns into something very dark. Kundera’s words:

    “There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere use­less and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea”…go a long way toward explaining why this is the case.

  6. “And then those young, intelligent, and radical peo­ple suddenly had the strange feeling of having sent out into the world an act that had begun to lead a life of its own, . . . .”

    . . . you mean like the people who really-truly believed that Joe Biden, “an act” “sent out into the world”, would return us to moderation and normalcy and civility, but the stubborn reality “ha[s] begun to lead a life of its own”? Those people? . . .

  7. Kundera’s view of lover’s drawing up of a rigid, unspoken and assumed contract precludes further growth in the relationship. The sapling of the giant sequoia tree bears little resemblance to the majesty it will reveal in its maturity.

    The leftist circle dance is an ideological prison.

    Thomas Sowell exhibits no regret at no longer being within the circle he dwelt within when young.

    Robert Frost, in the road less taken, celebrated his exclusion from circles.

    “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Groucho Marx

    “Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another.” Milan Kundera

    The dream of paradise is universal because it is reminiscent of the state from which we emerged at conception.

    The great sin of totalitarian ideologies like Marxism and Islam is in its willingness to force their idea of the dream upon us, which implicitly denies the right of the dissenting to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

    Only angels have no secrets from each other and as James Madison once said, “if people were angels, we would have no use for law”.

  8. Geoffery B.: “Kundera’s view of lover’s drawing up of a rigid, unspoken and assumed contract precludes further growth in the relationship. The sapling of the giant sequoia tree bears little resemblance to the majesty it will reveal in its maturity.”

    Indeed. After nine months together as a married couple I deployed on a WESPAC cruise for nine months. It could have been a bad thing. Instead, our time apart helped us mature. Mrs. JJ became a woman with the courage and wisdom to be the shepherd that squadron wives flocked to while the hubbies were overseas. For 38 years my work took me away from home many days a year. She was always there, keeping the family’s course true and stable. A comforting port welcoming me back each time I came home.

    And now, it’s been 29 years since I retired. Because of her steadfast love, strength, and ability to cope; our relationship has continued to grow – like a majestic Sequoia.

  9. true, then again whittaker chambers felt he had joined ‘the losing side’ of the argument, the ones who were the liberals in cuba in the 50s, found themselves typified as far rightists here in the states,

  10. Well, the right place for circle dancing is … circle dancing.

    One of the great openings of my life, as I’ve related a few times here, was being pulled into a circle of Israeli folk dancers at the end of my first year of college. I had never realized the power of group experience. At the end of the evening I was ecstatic and near tears.

    We were dancing to the “Hora Oranim Zabar Troupe” album, which was a standard of Israeli folk dancing music then.

    Here’s an iconic simple circle dance celebrating water. When the circle is widest, dancers crouch then dance into the center, gradually standing upright, like a water splash after a stone is dropped.

    –“Mayim”, “Hora Oranim Zabar Troupe” (1960)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQTBFVuutak

    I still can’t hear this music without responding emotionally.

    The problem isn’t circle dancing. It’s the fallacy that circle dancing should be a political metaphor for Everything.

    One can always return to a real circle dance.

    “Mayim, mayim, mayim…!”

  11. JJ,

    You are a very blessed man. Like George Bailey realizes in It’s A Wonderful life, the richest man in Bedford Falls.

  12. huxley,

    I was at a Serbian orthodox church wedding and the dancing was similar to what you described. I watched the chain of men and quickly picked up on the steps, put my left arm around the man at the right end of the chain and joined in. I was one of the few, non ethnic Serbs to attempt the traditional dances, and I agree with your experience. It was a great feeling.

    I absolutely love to dance. I’m not particularly, naturally good, not particularly naturally bad, but I love the experience of being on a crowded dance floor and moving to music. When I was in my teens and twenties I would sometimes go to clubs and literally dance for hours. It is one of the great feelings in life.

  14. }}} Once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

    Mrrr. All too many lose the romance with time.

    Romance is actually pretty simple… Consider:

    You are, together, a couple. WHY are you a couple? Because the benefits of “couple-ness” outweigh the downsides of couple-ness.

    And the downsides certainly exist — when you are alone, there is personal misfortune to be experienced. When you are a couple, there is three times that — there is your personal misfortune, there is your “others'” personal misfortune, and there is your pairwise misfortune (e.g., God Forbid, the loss of a child).

    To counter this, there is glue — For one, support from others can help tremendously in bad times. Secondly, there is joy in couple-ness — things you’ve done that were pleasant and memorable (e.g., they provide pleasure as a memory, in addition to that original, instantaneous pleasure).

    You stay together when things are tearing you apart because you have those memories, more than anything else.

    Romance is the art of making those memories on a continuing, ongoing basis. It’s never something routine — if you’re doing it day after day after day, that’s a chore, something to schedule. It has to be at least a kind of spontaneous. It has to come from “nowhere”, to surprise, to delight, to… create good memories.

    Making breakfast in bed is such an act. It should not generally be a “routine” thing, something you do all the time. It has to be a surprise, once in a while.

    One thing romance often does is display: “Your happiness matters to me.”

    Another thing is display: “I was thinking about you, even though I had no reason to be doing so.” This is why flowers and chocolates and surprise gifts are excellent.

    For women, in particular, with the first two, “suitable” gifts for either male or female, for the other, e.g., the classic “vacuum cleaner for your birthday” is not “suitable” — mind you, it’s funny, but a shop vac for a guy generally is, esp. if he was bitching about his shop vac on the last chore day — romantic gifts generally should not be chore-solutions, not even if the recipient actually needs the chore-solution… shop vac, yes. Tools needed for a specific job “he” needs to do are not, they border, intentionally or not, on a subtle form of nagging.

    Ideally, it needs to be a splurge-on-yourself kind of thing. For women, shopping trips while you patiently wait are something. Surprise dinner out (while making certain she did not cook beforehand) is often a thing (note: something that makes less work for her is usually very positive… For men, tools are often “the right thing”, because, as Tim Allen put it, “Ar Urr Urr Urr Ah!”. This is especially true if the tool is something you know “he wants but can’t justify”.

    And (side note of some importance, and you’ll see why shortly):

    You should have a certain equity in money. The classic, “There is her money, and our money” is a bad connective process. There needs to be equity — his money, her money, AND “our money”. And you generally keep them (his/hers) separate, with regular inputs, and once it’s there it is out of “the others'” sight and does not need justification — keep it in a bank account “the other” does not generally see or know the amount of. “It’s my money and I get to do what I damned well please with it, without having to explain, justify, or otherwise be concerned about it being frivolous.”

    And part of that, is, it has romantic relevance, too. If you buy something expensive out of “our money”, then you’ve just spent their money on something for them… you should be spending “your money”… that’s why it’s “a gift”.

    Giving me a discount coupon for a haircut isn’t a gift, it says you think I need to get my hair cut. 😀

    Likewise, spending “our money” on me is more generally not gifting as much as giving me a discount on something…While not asking me if I really really wanted to spend “my money” (which is what “our money” has become in that situation) on THAT thing as opposed to something else.

    “Our money” is for things that cover your shared needs, not for gifting (though you can agree to gift each other from it, mind you — say, a new car — but that takes discussion ahead of time, not romantic surprise).

    So: Romantic gifts have to be from “my money”, not from another source. It’s one more way you’re saying, “your happiness matters to me”, being as “I spent my money on you, and not on ME.”

    And to re-iterate the main point, in case it’s been forgotten:

    There are ups and downs in life, and being a couple imposes costs as well as benefits. The relationship begins to fall apart when you stop thinking about each other (e.g., as “a couple”), and stop realizing that you need to behave as a couple. This is actually all too easy to do if you don’t guard against it… You get busy in life and forget what the whole thing is all about. Making sure you have regular unscheduled “us time” is important to that “memorability” part of the process. Making sure you show that you were thinking about your “other” when you had no particular reason to do so is another part of it.

    It shows you are “together” in the face of things, not just “in each others’ space” in the face of things.

  15. I have not read Kundera. I will endeavor to.

    These quotes are so delicately written but so frightening.

    I wonder how likely those who participate in this blog believe the US has already become totalitarian or still have hope it will shake off the grip of it.

  16. This guy Kirk Durston thinks a certain J. Unwin’s mammoth book “Sex and Culture” indicates we are in a 3 (x33 yr each) generation spiral of civilization decline.
    https://www.kirkdurston.com/blog/unwin

    “Unwin examines the data from 86 societies and civilizations to see if there is a relationship between sexual freedom and the flourishing of cultures. …

    (2 of 6) Single most influential factor: Surprisingly, the data revealed that the single most important correlation with the flourishing of a culture was whether pre-nuptial chastity was required or not. It had a very significant effect either way. [in 1934]”

    When I was younger, I supported the Libertarian (and libertine) ideal of “responsible promiscuity”. Now I’m sure that’s wrong for civilization. I strongly fear our civilization is increasingly unable to flourish because it has given up the ideal of pre-nuptial chastity – but I also don’t see that ideal coming back too easily or quickly.

    Maybe tech progress will be fast enough to allow flourishing with sub-optimal sexual customs.

    The 600 page book: https://archive.org/details/b20442580/page/n7
    Durston’s good 26 page summary:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1asL0ANtZWD_hlV04dsZDbIOgJaKPOpzt/view?usp=sharing

  17. Jeanne (10:54 am) said: “I wonder how likely those who participate in this blog believe the US has already become totalitarian or still have hope it will shake off the grip of it.”

    I think it’s a matter of degree rather than binary. Speaking for me and me alone, I think the degree of “totalitarian” is increasing, and more and more rapidly. I hold out very little hope that it can be shaken off.

    I think the best we can hope for is a retarding of the rate of increase, plus a certain amount of rolling back. But it takes an enlightened and determined populace to roll it back — and make it stick. (The totalitarian instinct among us humans is *stubborn*.)

    And I hold out very little hope that the populace is going to change in a significant degree — especially given the influx of alien invaders who have little, if any, schooling in and appreciation for the liberties our founder bequeathed unto us.

  18. The appeal of the circle dance cannot be denied. It can be enough often to make one forget — or want very badly to forget — what is in fact true. The ache of even potentially not belonging is extremely powerful. Even when one’s paycheck and status don’t depend on it.

    Some of us for better or worse are, have been and ever will be denied access to the circle dance. Reasons vary. Personal quirks or awkwardness early on. Maybe a certain Aspergeriness. Maybe simply that, best efforts aside, one’s core competencies don’t and never will include fitting in. Maybe a simple inability not to notice that things don’t, however so insisted by the circle, fall upward.

    It’s easier to notice that things don’t fall upward when one’s never fit in. That’s about the only thing that’s easier.

    I used to fear for the Republic. I am more and more quietly resigned to its end.

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