Poets From The Czech Republic

"Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch."

"Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear — in other words, Communist kitsch."

"Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”"

"We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse."

"In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it."

"What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March."

"Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion."

"The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. … The aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. … Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence."

"Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence."

"I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare."

"This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared."

"It is always that way: between the moment he meets her again and the moment he recognizes her for the woman he loves, he has some distance to go."

"How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?"

"You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more."

"The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated."

"You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange."

"Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time."

"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together."

"No love can survive muteness."

"Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable."

"He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her."

"As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom."

"Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it."

"She said: "I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place.""

"(For Milan Kundera, "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting". Are we losing this battle?) NG: One of the most truthful and profound insights ever made."

"Kundera sees writers and artists as vital witnesses of the twentieth century as an age marked by tyranny, saying: 'People regard those days as an era of political trials, persecutions, forbidden books and legalised murder. But we who remember must bear witness; it was not only an epoch of terror, but also an epoch of lyricism, ruled hand in hand by the hangman and the poet.'"

"Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself."

"I particularly like the works of Milan Kundera such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being. His observations on human nature are more penetrating than those of Solzhenitsyn."

"He writes about his prick too much. Excuse me, boys. (What do you mean by that?) I happen to like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting very much. But this last book (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), it's really, it's as though he's been consumed by Western concerns. I think it's a corrupt book, I really do. I mean I really read it with great hopes because I really liked Laughter and Forgetting, I thought it was great. But I'm so disgusted. I mean who the fuck does he think he is? It's not that I don't think that a person can write about sexual obsession. I think there's not much more interesting than that in a way. I'm all for it. But it's so egocentrical and false, admiring her so much for this idiotic loyalty. (At the same time he's trying to use sex as a political metaphor.) Yeah, but so obviously. But I still like the other book."

"To remember, if my Latin is correct, actually means to put the parts together. So that implies there are ways of losing parts. Kundera talks about this aspect of storytelling, too. In fact, he says that history, which is another kind of story, is often deliberately falsified in order to make a people forget who they are or who they were. He calls that "the method of organizing forgetting.""

"A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality."

"The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish."

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace."

"Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the view­point of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil."

"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."

"Optimism is the opium of the people."

"Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another."

"Žádné pocínání není samo o sobe dohré ani zlé. Teprve jeho místo v rádu ciní je dobrým ci zlým."