Milan Kundera’s latest novel is a slim meditation on meaninglessness that is both random and entertaining.
Summer reading: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
“We want to be the masters of the future only for the power to change the past. ”
“To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy of angels. ”
“For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an undifferentiated universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. ”
“All of us are prisoners to a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise. ”
“The best progressive ideas are those that include a strong enough dose of provocation to make its supporters feel proud of being original, but at the same time attract so many adherents that the risk of being an isolated exception is immediately averted by the noisy approval of a triumphant crowd. ”
“It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly, and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense. ”