读《The unbearable lightness of being》
米兰昆德拉的这本巨作小书，我断断续续拿起放下过了两年才看完。第一次想读是在快离开纽约前，和浙大学姐Iris在Hobokon河边散步。她突然间跟我提起这本书，说身在异地的我们读起来应该很有共鸣。在芝加哥的图书馆借了这本书，读到三分之一被我弄丢了。搬来旧金山，从图书馆再一次借了这本书，终于读完了。因为英文单词很多比较晦涩，所以第一遍我算是快速浏览，今天的摘抄也很粗略。但非常喜欢。
昆德拉的文笔极其流畅，行云流水。就算是英文，我读起来也有如图歌曲一样。他很喜欢用重叠，不仅是同一个单词或者修辞反复出现，连剧情也反复出现，但每一次都有一些小小的变化，比如相似的事情发生在多个主人公身上。 让人觉得命运般地神秘奇妙。估计就是他说的 symmetrical composition吧。他也似乎毫不在意在书的前半段就告诉你主人公死于车祸的结局，然后一点点展开情节。所以你读之后的情节都会有一种很神奇的上帝视角，冷静而伤感。然后结尾却只字不提这场车祸，戛然而止在似乎是车祸的前一晚。仿佛一切都还有转机。我很好奇为什么没有人把这本书拍成电影。突然很想给他画storyboard哈哈。
The poetic beauty of Milan kundera lies in repetition. plot repetition, words repetition, he is not afraid to tell you what happened in the end. He prepares you for it.
In the world of eternal return, the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens. But the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
To put it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappear once and for all, whichdoes not return, is like a shadow, with out weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity and beauty mean nothing.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Anna meets Vronsky when they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself undera train. This symmetrical composition-- the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end–may seem quite "novelistic" to you. But human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us. Sabina was unaware of the goal that lay behind her longing to betray. She felt emptiness all around her. What if that emptiness was the goal of all her betrayals?
The story of Oedipus. Whether Communist knew or didn't know (the R ussian atrocities) is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?
When he saw a woman in her clothes, he could naturally imagine more or less what she would look like naked (his experience as a doctor supplementing his experience as a lover), but between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave hime no rest. And then, the pursuit of the unimaginable does not stop with the revelations of nudity. Thomas was obsessed by the desire to discover and appropriate that one-millionth part; he saw it as the core of this obsession. He was not obsessed with woman; he was obsessed with what in each of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other words, with the one-millionth part that makes a woman dissimilar to others of her sex.
Characters are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possiblity that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border which attracts me most. For beyond that border(the border beyond which my own "I" ends) begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. But enough, Let us return to Tomas.
The love that tied her to Karenin was better than the love between her and Tomas. Better, not bigger. It's a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couoples: Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, tes, probe, and save it, have the additonal effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand somthing from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts or development. Karenin surrounded Tereza and Timas witha life based on repetition, and he expected the same from them. If karenin had been a person instead of a dog, he would surely have long since said to Tereza, "Look, I'm sick and tired of carrying that roll in my mouth every day. Can't you come up with something different?" And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
生命之轻或许就是一切美，创造和悲剧的源泉吧。因为一切都无法重复，所以我们拼命探索，挣扎，与自相矛盾着。
