【摘抄】The Unbearable Lightness of Being
读了近一个月的书，传说中的昆德拉。读完依旧迷糊，实在是一本哲学意味和政治色彩俨然覆盖叙事性的小说。可以看出昆德拉的野心，太多的主题想要表达，闪回性的故事就显得晦涩繁复。Sex and love 的部分用逻辑和理论去分析两性关系有些费解，让我印象最深的反而是the invasion of Soviet Union and the upheaval of Eastern Europe。因言获罪的Tomas 被夺去体制内的工作被发配从事体力劳动，记者Teresa 目睹街上的游行和流血事件，知识分子们或被迫逃亡异乡，或隐匿乡下。
没法多说了，挺好奇中译本会如何处理Tomas 对Totalitarianism and Communism 的直白观点，应该是不可能原封不动译出来。
摘抄：
Nature has recourse at times to radical measures out never atter our fashion, which explains how it is that nothing is more fatal to a people than the mania for great reforms, however excellent these reforms may appear theoretically.
The myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.
Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict.
If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
The desire to fall into Tereza’s arms (he could still feel it while getting into his car in Zurich) had completely disintegrated. He fancied himself standing opposite her in the midst of a snowy lain, the two of them shivering from the cold.
It was not vanity that drew her to the mirror; it was amazement at seeing her own “I” She forgot she was looking at the instrument panel of her body mechanisms; she thought she saw her soul shining through the features of her face.
Each time she succeeded was a time of intoxication: her soul would rise to the surface of her body like a crew charging up from the bowels of a ship, spreading out over the deck, waving at the sky and singing in jubilation.
Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value itself.
A concentration camp is a world in which people live crammed together constantly, night and day. Brutality and violence are merely secondary (and not in the least indispensable) characteristics. A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy.
They were pictures of tanks, of threatening fists, of houses destroyed, of corpses covered with bloodstained red-white-and-blue Czech flags, of young men on motorcycles racing full speed around the tanks and waving Czech flags on long staffs, of young girls in unbelievably short skirts provoking the miserable sexually famished Russian soldiers by kissing random passersby before their eyes.
But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown.
He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word.
And at the moment he felt pleasure suffusing his body, Franz himself disintegrated and dissolved into the infinity of his darkness himself becoming infinite. But the larger a man grows in his own inner darkness, the more his outer form diminishes. A man with closed eyes is a wreck of a man.
She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.
Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children’s ball. Yes, a children’s ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery.
Once more she heard the golden horn of betrayal beckoning her in the distance, and she knew she would not hold out. She sensed an expanse of freedom before her and the boundlessness ofit excited her.
She leaned her back against its trunk and looked up. She saw the leaves resplendent in the sun; she heard the sounds of the city, faint and sweet, like thousands of distant violins.
The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.
People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
The sphere hanging in the not yet darkened sky seemed like a lamp they had forgotten to turn off in the morning, a lamp that had burned all day in the room of the dead.
We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions— love, antipathy, charity, or malice-and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
Human time does not turn in a circle; It runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
It was twilight in the garder, the time between day and evening. There was a pale moon in the sky, a forgotten lamp in the room of the dead.
Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below.
