The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: A Novel

by Milan Kundera

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

At a time when history still made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator’s tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the overfamiliar banality of private life.

This is how, I believe, life turns itself into destiny. Destiny has no intention of lifting a finger for Mirek (for his happiness, his security, his good spirits, his health), whereas Mirek is ready to do everything for his destiny (for its grandeur, its clarity, its beauty, its style, its intelligible meaning). He felt responsible for his destiny, but his destiny did not feel responsible for him.

Yes, he was looking back, because nowadays he had forgotten who he had been when he was young. He knew he had failed. That is why he wanted to know where he had come from, to understand where he had gone wrong.

We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.

The two sisters stretched out on their bed are not laughing about anything in particular, their laughter has no object, it is the expression of being rejoicing in being.

If there were too much incontestable meaning in the world (the angels’ power), man would succumb under its weight. If the world were to lose all its meaning (the devils’ reign), we could not live either.

Looked at from the outside, I haven’t experienced anything. Looked at from the outside! But I have a feeling that my experience inside is worth writing about

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.)

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

But the injustice that prevails here has led us to a mistaken indulgence toward other countries. Thanks to you, you know, thanks to you, Tamina, I’ve realized that the problem of power is the same everywhere, in your country and in ours, in the East as well as in the West. We should not try to replace one type of power with another, we should repudiate the very principle of power and repudiate it everywhere.”

because a name is continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name.

like melancholy flowers of forgetting.

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

That the infinitude of the exterior world escapes us we accept as natural. But we reproach ourselves until the end of our lives for lacking that other infinitude. We ponder the infinitude of the stars but are unconcerned about the infinitude our papa has within him.

Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge!

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.

History is a series of ephemeral changes, while eternal values are immutable, perpetuated outside history, and have no need of memory.

The woman Jan had loved most was right to say she held on to life by a spider thread. It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly,