The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: A Novel

by Milan Kundera

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

They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it’s not true. 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.

He longed to run away to a place where he could weave his own story, weave it by himself to his own taste and out of the reach of loving eyes. And deep down he did not even care about weaving himself a story, he simply wanted to be alone.

Karel is still filled with the night’s beauty. He knows full well that of his two or three thousand acts of love (how many times had he made love in his life?), no more than two or three are really essential and unforgettable, while the others are merely recurrences, imitations, repetitions, or evocations.

the thought then came to him that beauty is a spark that flashes when, suddenly, across the distance of years, two ages meet. That beauty is an abolition of chronology and a rebellion against time.

“A forced laugh. A laughable laugh. A laugh so laughable they can do nothing but laugh. Then comes real laughter. Bursts of repeated, rushing, unbridled laughter, explosions of magnificent laughter, sumptuous and mad. They laugh their laughter until the infinity of their laughter. . . . O laughter! Laughter of sensual pleasure, sensual pleasure of laughter . . .”

“We shall flee rest, we shall flee sleep, We shall outrun dawn and spring And we shall shape days and seasons To the measure of our dreams.”

You know what happens when two people talk. One of them speaks and the other breaks in: “It’s absolutely the same with me, I . . .” and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own “It’s absolutely the same with me, I . . .” The phrase “It’s absolutely the same with me, I . . .” seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other’s thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy’s ear by force. Because all of man’s life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.

But by a backlash, the effect affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.

the memory of revulsion is therefore stronger than the memory of tenderness

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

Love’s absolute is actually a desire for absolute identity: the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost. Anyone with wide experience of the common imperfection of mankind is relatively sheltered from the shocks of litost. For him, the sight of his own misery is ordinary and uninteresting. Litost, therefore, is characteristic of the age of inexperience. It is one of the ornaments of youth.

Misogynists don’t despise women. Misogynists don’t like femininity. Men have always been divided into two categories. Worshipers of women, otherwise known as poets, and misogynists, or, more accurately, gynophobes. Worshipers or poets revere traditional feminine values such as feelings, the home, motherhood, fertility, sacred flashes of hysteria, and the divine voice of nature within us, while in misogynists or gynophobes these values inspire a touch of terror. Worshipers revere women’s femininity, while misogynists always prefer women to femininity. Don’t forget: a woman can be happy only with a misogynist.

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

“We don’t want compromise, we want victory!” You must understand, by then there was no more than a choice among several varieties of defeat, but this town rejected compromise and wanted victory! That was litost talking! A man possessed by it takes revenge through his own annihilation.

Wandering the streets that do not know their names are the ghosts of monuments torn down. Torn down by the Czech Reformation, torn down by the Austrian Counter-Reformation, torn down by the Czechoslovak Republic, torn down by the Communists; even the statues of Stalin have been torn down. In place of those destroyed monuments, statues of Lenin are nowadays springing up in Bohemia by the thousands, springing up like weeds among ruins, like melancholy flowers of forgetting.

“You begin to liquidate a people,” Hübl said, “by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster.”

Tamina will never forgive herself for forgetting. “So what should I do?” asks Tamina. “Forget your forgetting,” says the young man.

In one of his pensées, Pascal says that man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the abyss of the infinitely small. The voyage of variations leads into that other infinitude, into the infinite diversity of the interior world lying hidden in all things.

At last she knew! 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!

It was an unbearable insult to become a corpse. One moment you are a human being protected by modesty, by the sacrosanctity of nakedness and intimacy, and then the instant of death is enough to put your body suddenly at anyone’s disposal—to undress it, to rip it open, to scrutinize its entrails, to hold one’s nose against its stench, to shove it into the freezer or into the fire.

This is what Papa told me when I was five years old: in music every key is a small royal court. The king (the first step of the scale) exercises power with the help of two princes (the fifth and fourth steps). Under their orders are four other dignitaries, each with his own special relation to the king and princes. The court also takes in five other tones, which are called chromatic. They of course occupy first-rank positions in other keys, but here they are only guests. Because each of the twelve tones has its own position, title, and function, any piece of music we hear is more than just a mass of sound: it is an action developing before us. Sometimes the events are terribly tangled (as in Mahler or still more in Bartók or Stravinsky), with princes from several courts intervening and soon you no longer know which tone is serving which court or if it isn’t serving several kings at once. But even then, the most naive listener can still make a rough guess about what is going on. Even the most complex music is still speaking the same language.

one day, a great man saw that after a thousand years the language of music had worn itself out and could only keep on repeating the same old messages. By revolutionary decree he abolished the hierarchy of tones and made them all equal. He imposed a strict discipline to prevent any of them from appearing in a piece more often than any other and thus from reclaiming old feudal privileges. Royal courts were abolished once and for all and replaced by a single empire based on equality and called the twelve-tone system.

Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and that joyous watchwords like “forward” and “farther” are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it.

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

Laughter was there like an enormous trap waiting patiently in the room, hidden behind a thin, invisible partition. Only a few millimeters separated physical love from laughter, and he dreaded crossing over them. Only a few millimeters separated him from the other side of the border, where things no longer have meaning.