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.

I emphasize: idyll and for all, because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere useless and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea.

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

Historical events mostly imitate one another without any talent, but it seems to me that in Bohemia history staged an unprecedented experiment.

What looked like political fanaticism was merely a pretense, a parable, a demonstration of faithfulness, disappointed love’s coded reproach.

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.

Those who have emigrated (one hundred twenty thousand people) and those who were reduced to silence and driven from their jobs (half a million people) are disappearing like a procession moving away into the fog, invisible and forgotten.

But a prison, even though entirely surrounded by walls, is a splendidly illuminated scene of history.

They wanted to efface thousands of lives from memory and leave nothing but an unstained age of unstained idyll.

tanks are perishable, pears are eternal.