Novelists From The Czech Republic

"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.'"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches."

"It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

"The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten. In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life."

"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten."

"The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!" The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late. Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."

"The first step in liquidating a people," said Hubl, "is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster."

"...[O]f a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, [...] everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted."

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia."

"In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body."

"And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?"

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."

"Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love."

""Figh-ting in the Bal-kans." Lord Jesus, another of God's punishments! But that war'll get here too! Is it far from here?"

"It's always the same thing, one war after another —"

"Each factory will be making Robots of a diťferent color, a different nationality, a different tongue; that they'll all be different — as different from one another as fingerprints; that they'll no longer be able to conspire with one another; and ... we, we people will help to foster their prejudices and cultivate their mutual lack of understanding, you see? So that any given Robot, to the day of its death, right to the grave, will forever hate a Robot bearing the trademark of another factory... Thunder, we'll make Black Robots and Swedish Robots and Italian Robots and Chinese Robots, and then let someone try to drive the notion of brotherhood into the noggin of their organization..."

"Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease."