Broke a Mirror
I've been in a serious-reading kick lately. Just finished Memories of a Pure Spring by Duong Thu Huong and am starting on Immortality by Kundera. It takes a certain mood to get Kundera, and I suppose with the season changing and the opportunity to people watch, I'm learning to appreciate him again. I had loved The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Laughter and Forgetting but didn't really identify with The Joke. With Immortality, he finally escapes from the theme of Czech communism and embraces the modern existential life in France.
It's good. Kundera borrows liberally from Sartre's The Look, but I think he is a genius at planning and setting up human interactions that explains and describes the philosophy.
Here's a key passage in the beginning moments that reads like philosophy 101:
It isn't enough for us to identify with ourselves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way can we regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence.
Then he elaborates further later on:
She picked up another magazine.. full of faces... If you put the pictures of two different faces side by side, your eye is struck by everything that makes one different from the other. But if you have two hundred and twenty-three faces side by side, you suddenly realize that it's all just one face in many variations and that no such thing as an individual ever existed.
Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone would put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright! You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.
The second passage is directly lifted from the premise in Sartre's No Exit. In the play, hell is a place where there are no mirrors, and the only way to identify yourself is to grasp it from the reactions of others. It's one of my favorite plays.
But the one thing I like about Kundera is his wry sense of humor:
Eternity as the sound of endless babble: one could of course imagine worse things, but the idea of hearing women's voices for ever, continuously, without end, gave her sufficient incentive to cling furiously to life and to do everything in her power to keep death as far away as possible.
She.. saw in front of her a woman dressed in baggy trousers barely reaching the knees, as was the fashion that year. The outfit seemed to make her behind even heavier and closer to the ground... Agnes said to herself: that woman could have found a dozen outfits that could have covered her bluish veins and made her behind less monstrous. Why hadn't she done so? Not only have people stopped trying to be attractive when they are out among other people, but they are no longer even trying not to look ugly!
As luck would have it, I was listening to High & Dry (Radiohead) when reading.. and the lyrics stuck out:
You'd kill yourself for recognition; kill yourself to never ever stop.
You broke another mirror; you're turning into something you are not.
I really like the Jamie Cullum (self-described "Sinatra in sneakers") version:
I recently read the Unbearable Lightness of Being and just bought Immortality but haven't started it yet. This makes me that much more excited about reading it. Thanks!
Posted by: Laura | April 25, 2007 at 04:00 PM
Hi Laura - still working on it but I'd love to hear your thoughts when you've finished.
Posted by: j.fisher | May 03, 2007 at 01:20 PM