On fighting

I have always felt (still feel) some sort of uneasiness when I hear people talking of fighting ("for" or "against"). And I would then remind myself about how Kundera's insight had helped me identify the reason for my mysterious uneasiness. Recently I held in my hands a library copy of "Immortality" Lalitha had left on the desk, and was casually flipping the pages when I came across this convincing passage again..

“…As if it were an ostinato providing the bass accompaniment to a musical composition, she kept silently repeating to the rhythm of her motion: I will fight, I will fight, I will fight, and she was sure that she would win.
Just open any dictionary. To fight means to set one’s will against the will of another, with the aim of defeating the opponent, to bring him to his knees, possibly to kill him. “Life is a battle” is a proposition that must at first have expressed melancholy and resignation. But our century of optimism and massacres has succeeded in making this terrible sentence sound like a joyous refrain. You will say that to fight against somebody may be terrible, but to fight for something is noble and beautiful. Yes, it is beautiful to strive for happiness (or love, or justice and so on), but if you are in the habit of designating your striving with the word “fight”, it means that your noble striving conceals the longing to knock someone on the ground. The fight for is always connected with the fight against, and the preposition “for” is always forgotten in the course of the fight in favor of the preposition “against” ”
--- "Immortality",(1990), Milan Kundera,

On roads and highways

Someone asked me what I think about, while driving long distances (across the highways)…

For eight days I had been scrapping my shoes on the stones of the roads…writes Rimbaud.
Road: a strip of ground over which one walks. A highway differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A highway is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and waste of time.
Before roads and paths disappeared from the landscape, they had disappeared from the human soul: Man stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and to enjoy it. What’s more, he no longer saw his own life as a road but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of widow. Time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that has to be overcome by ever greater speed.
Road and highway; these are also two different conceptions of beauty. When Paul says that at a particular place the landscape is beautiful, that means: if you stopped the car at that place, you might see a beautiful fifteenth century castle surrounded by a park; or a lake reaching far into the distance, with swans floating on its brilliant surface.
In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty, connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
In the world of roads and paths, beauty is continuous and constantly changing; it tells us at every step: “Stop!”
The world of roads was the world of fathers. The world of highways was the world of husbands. And Agnes’s story closes like a circle: from the world of road to that of highways, and now back again. For Agnes is moving to Switzerland. That decision has already been made, and this is the reason that throughout the last two weeks she has been feeling so continuously and madly happy.
---‘Immortality’ (1990), Milan Kundera

Reading Kundera

Reading Kundera has ever been a self-discovering experience for me. Excuse me for talking more about myself, while the title, bears the name of one of the greatest philosophers ever lived and gives the impression of a discussion about his style of writing and other artistic and humane virtues.

I should say that it has been more of self-reflective in nature than a discovery by itself. I am the same human being, I was before reading Kundera. SO it is more of a self-reflective experience. Being listened is a very individualistic desire in every human being, I believe. Sadness occurs when one is not heard or listened to, by anyone around him/her.

Life has taken me to a new environment; New human beings, new culture and strange things happening around…The mortal bindings of love has made it impossible to talk with the loved ones, many of the bare truths of life. It might take many years, till I gain the familiarity of human beings in my new habitat, who would listen to me and whom I would listen to. The desire to talk my heart out, has been growing, with increasing pressure. The world around me has diversified and the people have changed; their needs have changed; many among who had been in my life are busy traversing in the new realms of their life. The world is running in time, and ideas which don’t talk about euphoria, development and success, are generally not heard. Nevertheless I can’t blame anyone for not listening to me! It is a very helpless situation.

There came Kundera to my rescue. When I read him, I read my mind; a conversation with myself.. a very slow conversation without any haste, or constraints of time..a conversation well listened to, properly interpreted, so as to obtain maximum satisfaction..

In this process, I discover a similitude of thought process between mine and Kundera's. As for any human being, I too started getting the satisfaction that many of what I have been thinking about were all not mere waste of time and thoughts; but that there had been many immortals who wrote, sung and played with the thoughts similar in emotion to mine, though of obvious superiority and strength in quality.

I discovered that the negative qualities like pessimism, sadness, etc have their significance and the whole world is shadowed in the so called positive qualities, while in reality, it is immersed in sadness. That is the truth. Yes, Kundera helped me see and feel the bare truths of life; which often, we human beings neglect to acknowledge.

I have never seen any other writing as strong as his (you can count on my limited familiarity to world literature). His is the writing that redefines the concepts of morality, which is often a man-made set of rules, created for his own convenience to simultaneously practice immorality and preach morality. He explores the meaning of love, which is invisibly binded to the mortal pleasures of human consciousness. His writings are the truth incarnated. The truth in its total nudity…this truth is bold..it is the strongest atom bomb, I believe... It can break apart anything, a relationship; a culture; a race...

Still my desire for being listened continues with its fullest pressure. It may make me do the strangest things in my life. Quite recently I have discovered music to be incapable of helping in an explicit communication with the souls around us, with whom we wish to communicate. Music has many limitations like religion, rules, culture and tradition, which arrests its degrees of freedom….

To be contd…