Bits from Milan Kundera

Recently I read a book from Milan Kundera, called Ignorance. I enjoyed it a lot and I would like to record some of the lines of book for myself here.




" A human lifetime is 80 years long on average. A person imagines and organizes his life with that span in mind. What I have just said everyone knows, but only rarely do we realize that the number of years granted us is not merely a quantitative fact, an external feature (like eye color, but is part of the very definition of the human. A person who might live with all his faculties, twice as long, say 160 years, would not belong to our species. Nothing about his life would be like ours- not love, or ambitions, or feelings, or nostalgia; nothing. If after 20 years abroad an emigre were ti come back to his native land with another hundred years of life ahead of him he would have little sense of Great Return, for him it would probably not be a return at all, just one of the many byways in the long journey of his life.

For the very notion of homeland, with all its emotional power, is bound up with the relative brevity of our life, which allows us too little time to become attached to some other conutry, to other countries, to other languages.

Sexual relations can take up the whole adult life. But if that life were a lot longer, might not staleness stifle the capacity for arousal well before one's physical powers declined? For there is an enormous difference between the first and the tenth, the hundredth, the thousandth or the ten thousandth coitus. Where lies the boundary line beyond which the repetition becomes stereotyped, if not comical or even impossible? And once that boundary is crossed, what would become of the erotic relationship between a man and woman? Would it vanish? Or on the contrary, would lovers consider the sexual phase of their lives to be the barbaric prehistory of real love? Answering these questions is as easy as imagining the psychology of inhabitants of an unknown planet.
The notion of love ( of great love, of one-and only love) itself also drives, probably, from narrow bounds of the time we are granted."

" Memory can not be understood, either without a mathematical approach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life is stored in memory. No one has ever tried to calculate this ratio, and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assume that memory retains no more than a millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of lived life. That fact too is part of is part of the essence of man. If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings: neither his love nor his friendships not his angers not his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours. ...."