/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"}: THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING ~ Milan Kundera

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Friday, March 26, 2010

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING ~ Milan Kundera

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING
~ Milan Kundera

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This is either a book of philosophy masquerading as a novel, or a novel about the lives of four or five characters with pretensions to be a book of philosophy. Either way, it's an amazing work. Kundera deals with his characters in a rather sketchy way, using them to pose a number of questions, rather than to go into great psychological depth. Yet, even there, the characters Tomas and Tereza do come through well. Their moods and motivations, even their dreams, hold a reader's attention. A couple of the others, Sabina and Franz, maybe Franz' wife, are very light indeed. Kundera is interested in sex and love, in the fact that they tie people down, in the fact that they are so fickle, so gossamer light, yet so important. In a time when ideology and/or political oppression create craziness or stupidity and the common sense of daily life is overthrown - as in post-1968 Czechoslovakia - love and sex are more or less what is left for people to hang on to. Kundera also ponders the choices that people make, and the extremely haphazard way these choices come about, based perhaps on endless strings of coincidence. This is not a novel long on plot. Rather it is a vehicle for some very intelligent musings. When living under oppressive rulers "is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?" What is the nature of love? Man is a 'cow parasite', he tells us, (though he's probably talking about a certain percent of humanity only) and goes on to say that attitude towards animals is a fundamental moral test of Man. We've failed. As you live, you write the story of your life. You don't get the chance to "write" an alternative story; there are no comparisons for you. History is the same, he says, as light as individual human life. There is no possibility of comparison of chances either in history or life. These are only a small sample of the interesting thoughts and ideas Kundera mulls over. The choice you make by reading it, may evolve into something completely different in your life, have totally different repercussions sooner or later. Will you recognize that? After all, each book of any consequence you read leaves an imprint. THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING will definitely do so.

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A Digital or Virtual LIBRARY comprising of Free "eBooks" ~ Articles ~ Discussions ~ Posts ~ Links ~ Photos ~ Videos about "AUTEUR" Films ~ FICTION ~ Poetry ~ Arts & Literature ~ Theatre ~ Philosophy ~ Psychology ~ Music ~ Science ~ Culture etc.

Library.Babel

Interests: Schizophrenia, Metaphysics, Existentialism, Autism... Andrzej Tarkovsky... Ingmar Bergman... Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera... M.D. Ramanathan, Kumar Gandharva... J.S. Bach, Wagner...

/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"}

~ The {Title} is taken from Borges' {The Library at Babel} ~

Borges' "The Library at Babel" is a story that encompasses a world. The world that is a library, a library that is a universe broken into endless hexagons connected by stairs and hallways. It's unlike any library that has ever existed, a library of the mind, a virtual library, and as such the source of imaginative illustration. I've encountered pictures of its hexagonal galleries and infinite air shafts on Web Sites, and recently the story was re-published in hardcover with engravings by Erik Desmazieres, who gave the Library's interior a spooky look that I associate with the interiors of Ridley Scott's 1979 science-fiction. Many, of course, would choose to interpret the story in a more philosophical manner. Certainly a case can be made to see the story as a parable about man's search for God, or man's essential ignorance of the world, or of the chaos of the universe. While I acknowledge the story's visual and philosophical qualities, it has a personal connection. It evokes what I would call the large-library experience. Borges' nameless librarian, an administrator of some minor sort - if the library is infinite, all administrators are minor - recollects, "Like all men of the library, I have traveled in my youth, I have wandered in search of a book." Reading this, I think of my own rambles through stacks and shelves both as a student and an unattached "scholar." I've wandered through libraries looking for or just at books, feeling their collective weight, reading titles, puzzling at the cipher of numbers and letters by which they are classified. I have been lost in corridors of books like one drifting through the pinched streets of some foreign town, though indeed these rambles have taken part in and around my home. Books as realia have been part of this attraction. Strolling between shelves of bound volumes, I feel I'm pressed between the scales of some vast and dormant beast. Opened, each book presents a small bracket of hard space and distilled experience that, when joined in imagination with other books, create the sensation of time congealed. Books in vast quantities form a reality greater than the sum of their parts. Unlike museums, whether of science or art, that enfold me in a history of eras and schools and "movements," large libraries point beyond their realia. They go from the tangible to the intangible, from the temporal to the timeless, from the momentary to the eternal. Masses of books suggest the infinite. - Garrett Rowlan

/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"} is dedicated to:

My Eternal Lover & Mentor ~
"Jorge Luis Borges"

/Library Ticket/

The movement of atoms is eternal.

Thrown through the void,
either by their own weight
or by the impact of other atoms,
they wander
until chance brings them together.

Some of them manage to cling together;
they form the most solid bodies.

Others,
more mobile,
are separated by a greater distance;
they form the less dense bodies,
air and light.

Some did not wish to be admitted to any group;
they move around gloriously and endlessly in space,
like dust motes lit up by rays of light in a dark room.

[from Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, recited by Rousseau in La vallée close]

~ This seemingly simple poetry reminds us that every work of Art is relative to the Grand Time wherein it was sprout, and is to be judged thus. We won't/ might not hold a good opinion when we read and consider these lines now, after two decades of Stephen Hawking and 'A Brief History of Time'. This poem was written in First Century BC, by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. Now, do we ought to re-think and re-consider our opinion? Epicurean Physics, atomism, the nature of the mind and soul, explanations of sensation and thought, the development of the world and its phenomena, a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena, arguments about God, Lucretius' Physics - everything is here, in these simple lines of poetry ~

Concept & Design:
Library.Babel

/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"}