What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing everybody has: the body and its needs, its maladies, its manias – constipation, for instance, or menstruation. We ashamedly conceal these intimate matters not because they are so personal but because, on the contrary, they are so lamentably impersonal.
Here he was, doing things he didn’t care a damn about, and enjoying it.
Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced that they had discovered the road to paradise.
No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we’d rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn’t know how to deal with women.
And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their meaning lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness.
He goes on reading, and remembers nothing. So what has this stranger come to tell him? To remind him that he used to live here under Josef’s name?
Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot – he could accept it all more easily than he dared to admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza’s dream was something he could not endure.
Indeed, all he remembers are situations that make him displeased with himself.
And in fact, Soviet films, which flooded the cinemas of all Communist countries in that cruelest of times, were saturated with incredible innocence and chastity. The greatest conflict tat could occur between two Russians was a lovers’ misunderstanding: he thought she no longer loved him; she thought he no longer loved her. But in the final scene they would fall into each others’ arms, tears of happiness trickling down their cheeks.
To cover his tracks and mask his erotic withdrawal, he took pleasure in good-naturedly dirty stories and mildly ambiguous allusions, all delivered loudly and with laughter. The mother was his best ally, ever quick to support him with smutty remarks that she would pronounce in some exaggerated, parodic manner, and in her puerile English. Listening to the two of them, Irena got the sense that eroticism had once and for all turned into childish clowning.
The crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body.
She admired her passion, knowing that passion is by definition excessive.
All he knew about old age was that it a time when a person had passed his maturity; when fate had ended; when there was no longer any need to fear that terrible mystery called the future; when every love than came along was certain and final.
He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!
It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.
Chi tende continuamente verso l’alto deve aspettarsi, prima o poi, di essere colto dalla vertigine.
I’ve always had the sense that my life is run by other people. Except for a few years after Martin died. Those were the toughest years, I was alone with my children, I had to cope by myself. Complete poverty. You won’t believe this, but nowadays when I look back, those are my happiest years.
La persona que desea abandonar el lugar en donde vive no es feliz.
Only her husband had kept asking her questions, because love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
I regimi criminali non furono creati da criminali ma da entusiasti, convinti di aver scoperto l’unica strada per il paradiso. Essi difesero con coraggio questa strada, giustiziando per questo molte persone. In seguito, fu chiaro che il paradiso non esisteva e che gli entusiasti erano quindi degli assassini.