David Seruyange's Radio Weblog

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Immortal Politics

I wanted to have this as a separate entry although it still pertains to Immortality. Kundera is in the process of describing political process and uses a meeting between Napoleon and Geothe as his vehicle - I was reading this last night with CNN on mute accross the room:

"Politicians make long speeches in which they keep shamelessly repeating the same thing, knowing that it makes not difference whether they repeat themselves or not since the general public will never get to learn more than the few words journalists cite from the speeches. In order to facilitate the journalists’ work and to manipulate the approach a little, politicians insert into their ever more identical speeches one or two concise, witty phrases that they have never used before, and this in itself is so unexpected and astounding that the phrases immediately become famous. The whole art of politics these days lies not in running the polis (which runs itself by the logic of its own dark and uncontrollable mechanism), but in thinking up “sound bites” by which the politician is seen and understood, measured in opinion polls, and elected or rejected in elections."

I coo as this resonates in the very same moment as a 'press breifing' is aired. It is surreal. I flip to the inside cover to find out when this book was published in English - 1991 - almost as though I can't believe he wrote it then and he is rather whispering it to me as I lie in bed casually tracking war updates.

posted in [home], [books]

6:50:33 AM comment []

Bleak

I am not finished with Immortality but it is darkening my mood. Here are some vignettes:

Marriage
"The marital bed: the altar of marriage; and when one says altar, one implies sacrifice. Here one of them sacrifices for the other: both have trouble falling asleep, and their partner's noisy breathing wakes them; so they wriggle toward the edge of the bed, leaving a broad space down the middle; they pretend to be sound asleep in the hope of making sleep easier for their partner, who will then be able to turn from side to side without disturbing the other. Unfortunately, the partner does not make sue of this opportunity because he too (and for the same reason) pretends to be asleep and fears to budge.
Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed."

God and man
"That God created the world and then left it to a forsaken humanity trying to address him in an echoless void-- this idea isn't new. Yet it is one thing to be abandoned by the God of our forefathers and another to be abandoned by God the inventor of a cosmic computer. In his place, there is a program that is ceaselessly running in his absence, without anyone being able to change anything what3ever. To load a program into the computer: this does not mean the future has been planned down to the last detail, that everything is written 'up above'...
Everything else is without importance, from the Creator's point of view, and is only a play of permutations and combinations within a general program, which is not a prophetic anticipation of the future but merely sets the limits of possibilities which all power of decision has been left to chance."

So Agnes, an early protagonist, thinks. My questions now are whether Kundera is using her contemplations to assert philosophical positioning into the context of discussing man's permanence (hence immortality) or if these views are molded over time into some catharsis that has a softer landing. One reviewer on Amazon says that reading Kundera is like having lunch with a philosophy professor and then realizing that he is a great storyteller. It's true.

posted in [home], [books]

6:37:53 AM comment []