on choosing to be [ ]
It is hard for a novelist to give examples of his idea of lightness from the events of everyday life, without making them the unattainable object of an endless quete. This is what Milan Kundera has done with great clarity and immediacy. His novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is in reality a bitter confirmation of the Ineluctable Weight of Living, not only in the situation of desperate and all-pervading oppression that has been the fate of his hapless country, but in a human condition common to us all, however infinitely more fortunate we may be. For Kundera the weight of living consists chiefly in constriction, in the dense net of public and private constrictions that enfolds us more and more closely. His novel shows us how everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight. Perhaps only the liveliness and mobility of the intelligence escape this sentence-- the very qualities with which this novel is written, and which belong to a world quite different from the one we live in.
-- pp. 7, "Lightness."
The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius is the first great work of poetry in which knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is infinitely minute, light, and mobile. Lucretius set out to write the poem of physical matter, but he warns us at the outset that this matter is made up of invisible particles. He is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies. Lucretius' chief concern is to prevent [9] the weight of matter from crushing us. Even while laying down the rigorous mechanical laws that determine every event, he feels the need to allow atoms to make unpredictable deviations from the straight line, thereby ensuring freedom both to atoms and to human beings. The poetry of the invisible, of infinite unexpected possibilities-- even the poetry of nothingness-- issues from a poet who had no doubts whatever about the physical reality of the world.
...For Ovid, too, everything can be transformed into something else, and knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
- Italo Calvino, pp. 8-9, "Lightness," Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
-- pp. 7, "Lightness."
The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius is the first great work of poetry in which knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is infinitely minute, light, and mobile. Lucretius set out to write the poem of physical matter, but he warns us at the outset that this matter is made up of invisible particles. He is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies. Lucretius' chief concern is to prevent [9] the weight of matter from crushing us. Even while laying down the rigorous mechanical laws that determine every event, he feels the need to allow atoms to make unpredictable deviations from the straight line, thereby ensuring freedom both to atoms and to human beings. The poetry of the invisible, of infinite unexpected possibilities-- even the poetry of nothingness-- issues from a poet who had no doubts whatever about the physical reality of the world.
...For Ovid, too, everything can be transformed into something else, and knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
- Italo Calvino, pp. 8-9, "Lightness," Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
Labels: italo calvino, milan kundera
posted by M. at 9:16 PM
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