Milan Kundera

A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence 'their memories no longer match'. We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Then again, what can we expect of our weak memory? It records only 'an insignificant, minuscule particle' of the past, 'and no-one knows why it's this bit and not any other bit'. We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, a fact we refuse to recognise. Only those who return after twenty years, like Odysseus returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance first-hand. Milan Kundera is the only author today who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.

Ignorance

michaela bakajsova

Všetky predpovede sa mýlia, to je jedna z výnimočných istôt, ktorú človek dostal do vienka. Ale ak sa mýlia, hovoria pravdu o tých, ktorí ich oznamujú, nie o ich budúcnosti, ale o ich prítomnom čase. 

Ale tí, ktorí sa nestretávajú so Svojimi krajanmi, ako Irena a Odyseus, sú nevyhnutne postihnutí amnéziou. Čím je ich nostalgia silnejšia, tým väčšmi sa z nej spomienky vytrácajú. Čím väČšmi Odyseus prahol po domove, tým väčšmi naň zabúdal. Lebo nostalgia nezlepšuje činnost pamäti, neprebúdza spomienky, vystačí si sama so sebou, s vlastnou emóciou, celkom zaujatá jediným utrpením.

Hudba sa stala obyčajným hlukom,hlukom medzi inými hlukmi.

Magda 

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.

A person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn't expect much from her reunions.

. Algos means "suffering". So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

In that etymological light, nostalgia seems like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you.

, and their own verb; the most moving Czech expression of love: 

 ("I yearn for you", "I'm nostalgic for you", "I cannot bear the pain of your absence.").

something about trying to rekindle old friendships only to find out you’ve walked different paths, lived different lives, speaks so strongly to me. the ignorance of irena to assume they would like wine because of her experiences, only to find out they are simple, beer drinkers.

She leafed through her old address books, lingering over halt-forgotten names; then she reserved a room at a restaurant. On a long table against the wall, alongside platters of petits fours, twelve bottles stood in neat rows. In Bohemia people don't drink good wine, and there is no custom of laying down vintage bottlings. She bought this old Bordeaux with all the greater pleasure: to surprise her guests, to make a party for them, to regain their friendship. She came close to ruining it all. Awkwardly her friends eye the bottles until one of them, full of confidence and proud of her plain-and-simple style, declares her preference for beer. Emboldened anew by this outspokenness , the others go along and the beer lover calls the waiter. Irena blames herself for having committed an act of poor taste with her case of Bordeaux, for thoughtlessly underscoring everything that stands between them: her long absence from the country, her foreigner's ways, her wealth….Rejecting the wine was rejecting her. 

You told me love was only about bodies. Dear girl, you would run off in a minute if a man told you he was only interested in your body. And you would come to understand the dreadful sensation of loneliness.

Ignorance quotes

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