The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: 'A masterpiece' (Salman Rushdie)

by Milan Kundera

struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The constitution did indeed guarantee freedom of speech, but the laws punished anything that could

In the political jargon of those days, the word “intellectual” was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people.

He felt responsible for his destiny, but his destiny did not feel responsible for him.

The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.

Mirek had known this for a long time. For all of the past year, he had been drawn irresistibly to the idea of prison. It was probably the way Flaubert was drawn to Madame Bovary’s suicide. No, Mirek could not imagine a better ending for the novel of his life.

We write books because our children aren’t interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.

What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is not a difference in passions but one passion’s different results.

“I can’t stand Dédé anymore. When he comes home from one of his selling trips, he stays in bed two whole days. Two days in pajamas! Would you put up with that? And the worst is when he wants to fuck. He can’t understand that I don’t enjoy fucking, absolutely not a bit. I should leave him. He spends all his time planning his stupid vacation. In bed in his pajamas and holding an atlas. First he wanted to go to Prague. Now he never mentions it. He found a book about Ireland, and he wants to go there no matter what.”

I think Thomas Mann sounded that “faint, clear, metallic tone” to create silence. He needed that silence to make beauty audible (because the death he was speaking of was death-beauty), and for beauty to be perceptible, it needs a minimal degree of silence (of which the precise measure is the sound made by a golden ring falling into a silver basin).

(Yes, I realize you don’t know what I’m talking about, because beauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise—the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music—we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year.)

“Is one alive when other men are living?”

By writing books, a man turns into a universe (don’t we speak of the universe of Balzac, the universe of Chekhov, the universe of Kafka?), and it is precisely the nature of a universe to be unique. The existence of another universe threatens it in its very essence.

The difference between Tamina and Goethe is the difference between human being and writer.

Someone who writes books is either everything (a unique universe in himself and to all others) or nothing. And because it will never be given to anyone to be everything, all of us who write books are nothing. We are unrecognized, jealous, embittered, and we wish the others dead. In that we are all equals: Banaka, Bibi, I, and Goethe.

Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.

Boccaccio never understands anyone, because to understand is to merge and to identify with. That is the secret of poetry. We consume ourselves in the beloved woman, we consume ourselves in the idea we believe, we burn in the landscape we are moved by.”

“Laughter, on the other hand,” Petrarch went on, “is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That’s why I tell you yet again, and want you to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn’t understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.”

kafka meaning jackdaw in Czech.

Only her husband had kept asking her questions, because love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.

“Some place where things are as light as the breeze. Where things have lost their weight. Where there’s no remorse.”

It is death sweetly bluish, like nonbeing. Because nonbeing is an infinite emptiness and empty space is blue and there is nothing more beautiful and more soothing than blue. Not at all by chance did Novalis, the poet of death, love blue and search for nothing else on his journeys. Death’s sweetness is blue in color.

He shouted “Children, never look back!” and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.