Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"But that feeling soon gives way to another: The privilege of love was not only a paradise, it was also a hell. Life in love was constant tension, fear, agitation. She is here among children to gain, at last, the rewards of calm and serenity."

"Now she is torn between two feelings: Love is a privilege, and all privileges are undeserved and must be paid for. It is thus for punishment that she is here on the children’s island."

"That primeval state of music (music without thought) mirrors the human being’s inherent stupidity. It required an immense effort of heart and mind for music to rise above that essential stupidity, and it is that splendid arc over centuries of European history which has been extinguished like a skyrocket at the peak of its trajectory."

"The sadder people were, the more the loudspeakers played."

"There is no more boisterous, no more unanimous agreement than the agreement with being."

"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."

"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."

"That is what Papa told me, and what follows is all my own: 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."

"A body whose every part was marked by Tamina’s and her husband’s love story had sunk into insignificance, and in that insignificance there was relief and repose.”

"Death’s sweetness is blue in color."

"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!"

"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."

"In one of his pensées, Pascal says that man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the abyss of the infinitely small."

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

"“And the language?”
“Why bother taking it away? It will become a mere folklore and sooner or later die a natural death.”"

"“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.”"

"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."

"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."

"That was after the 1914–1918 war. Tamina spent her childhood on Stalin Avenue, and it was on Vinohrady Avenue that her husband picked her up to take her to her new home. And yet it was always the same street, they just kept changing its name, brainwashing it into a half-wit."

"The street Tamina was born on was called Schwerinova Street. That was during the war, when Prague was occupied by the Germans. Her father was born on Cernokostelecka Avenue. That was under Austria-Hungary. When her mother married her father and moved in there, it was Marshal Foch Avenue. That was after the 1914–1918 war."

"The time of Kafka’s novel is the time of a humanity that has lost its continuity with humanity, of a humanity that no longer knows anything and no longer remembers anything and lives in cities without names where the streets are without names or with names different from those they had yesterday, because a name is continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name."

"Gottwald, Clementis, and all the others were unaware even that Kafka had existed, but Kafka had been aware of their ignorance. In his novel, Prague is a city without memory. The city has even forgotten its name."

"Gottwald, Clementis, and all the others were unaware even that Kafka had existed, but Kafka had been aware of their ignorance. In his novel, Prague is a city without memory. The city has even forgotten its name."

"Which makes me think that when someone can neither slap a girl who swims too fast nor get himself killed by the Persians, when he has no means of escaping from litost‚ then poetry’s charm flies to his assistance.”

"“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.”"

"Boccaccio is a jackass. Boccaccio never understands anyone, because to understand is to merge and to identify with. That is the secret of poetry.'

"A moment before,they had been roaring with laughter,but now at a single stroke they all agreed with the student,because they were just as proud as Lermontov & were only ashamed to say so,not realizing that when the word “proud” is properly enunciated it stops being laughable & becomes witty & noble.So they were grateful to the student for giving them such good advice & one of them,probably Verlaine,even applauded."

"The student realized that the moment he was waiting for had arrived.He stood up like Lermontov & looked around at the assembled poets:“You don’t understand Lermontov.A poet’s pride is not ordinary pride.Only the poet himself can know the value of what he writes.Others don’t understand it until much later,or they may never understand it.So it’s the poet’s duty to be proud.If he weren’t,he would betray his own work."

"And so I am watching them from the height of my lookout, but the distance is too great. Fortunately, there is a tear in my eye, which, like a telescope lens, brings me nearer to their faces.”

"Since revenge can never reveal its true motive (the student cannot confess to the girl that he slapped her because she swam faster than he did), it must put forward false reasons. Litost, therefore, is always accompanied by a pathetic hypocrisy: the young man proclaims he is terrified his girlfriend will drown, and the child incessantly playing off key feigns an irremediable lack of talent."