Excerpts...

Current song - Ben Kweller - "In Other Words"


While bored this afternoon I so happened to be glancing through a few old books of mine, one of which was my favorite book - "The Unbearable Lightness of Being".

I flipped through the pages to find parts that I had marked or pages folded for future reference (a habit I cannot break). I stumbled upon these two that, although they had about 40 pages between them.. seemed very connected. These excerpts reminded me, once again, why I love Milan Kundera so...

First:
Page 209
"His adventure with Tereza began at the exact point where his adventures with other women left off. It took place on the other side of the imperative that pushed him into conquest after conquest. He had no desire to uncover anything in Tereza. She had come to him uncovered. He had made love to her before he could grab the imaginary scalpel he used to open the prostrate body of the world. Before he could start wondering what she would be like when they made love, he loved her.
Their love story did not begin until afterward: she fell ill and he was unable to send her home as he had the others. Kneeling by her as she lay sleeping in his bed, he realized that someone had sent her downstream in a bulrush basket. I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."

and
Page 239.
"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Let us suppose that such is the case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body. Tomas's other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he is sent a Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato's myth?
He tried to picture himself living in an ideal world with the young woman from his dream. He sees Tereza walking past the open window of their ideal house. She is alone and stops to look in at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes. He cannot withstand her glance. Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls prey to compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and pressed them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and again he will abandon the house of his happiness, time and again abandon his paradise and the woman of his dream and betray the "Es muss sein!" of his love and go off with Tereza, the woman born of six laughable fortuities."

Kundera, you slay me.