This is not a review. I have no idea how to review literature, especially Czech lit.

Klíma, Ivan. Love and Garbage.

I finished this book last night, having read it and Kundera’s The Joke over the summer for my book discussion group. I really do not know enough about Czech history to properly place these books, or Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in their proper context. Nonetheless, I have enjoyed them all.

I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being a few years ago for a grad sociology seminar in “lived morality.” It was the first work of literature that I had read in many, many years and I had to analyze the morality on display in it after one reading. I posted my paper to my original blog, reproduced here. [I have no idea what that stupid emoticon is doing in there. One other oddity from my move to WordPress to investigate.]

As I said, no review, but I would like to cite a few of the passages that I found meaningful, if not necessarily related to our discussion group on realism in Western lit. I have not quoted everything that I found particularly meaningful. Some passages are too personal, and even in some of these that I have quoted you will be unable to grasp much of the context relevant to me.

Thus my home became for me both a refuge and a cage, I wanted to remain in it and yet also to flee from it; to have the certainty that I would not be driven out and also the hope that I’d escape one day (14).

There was a period in my life, not so long ago, where I constantly felt like this. Nowadays, it rarely bubbles up, but the feeling does remain buried in me somewhere.

I wanted to achieve this not out of some kind of pride but because I realise that the most important things in life are non-communicable, not compressible into words, even though the people who believe they have discovered them always try to communicate them, even though I myself try to do so. But anyone who believes that he has found what is truly enduring and that he can communicate to others the essence of God, that he has discovered the right faith for them, that he has finally glimpsed the mystery of existence, is a fool or a fantasist and, more often than not, dangerous (16).

The prime context for this was on being a writer and discovering the ineffable and important for oneself. But the second half seems even more relevant in today’s world.

What feelings does a person experience in a place where death spreads his wings more often than birds (28)?

Resonated with me based on much of my other readings for the “lived morality” course, especially Todorov’s Facing the Extreme. As macabre as this thought may be, I wish many more people in today’s world might really be able to consider it seriously. Maybe, just maybe, there might be a bit less wholesale slaughter.

The protagonist on why he writes; possibly why some of us blog?:

Years ago, I persuaded myself that I would be able to communicate these images to someone, that there were even people about who were waiting for them in order to share my joys and sorrows. I did all I could to meet their supposed expectations: I was doing this not from pride or any sense of superiority but because I wanted someone to share my world with me (54).

The following quote struck me as relevant to preservation within cultural heritage institutions, to consumerism, and to mass society, amongst other things:

This is something we are both aware of: that the world is groaning, choking with a multitude of creations, that it is buried by objects and strangled by ideas which all pretend to be necessary, useful or beautiful and therefore lay claim to perpetual endurance (107).

And yes, I realize that this is quite applicable to this blog, along with blogging in general. There is no need for anyone to comment that this is in contradiction to my own practices. For one, I am not arguing that this blog, nor my previous one, need to be preserved. I am also not pretending that this is “necessary, useful or beautiful.” If anyone finds it such, then so much the better. But I am not pretending to think it is, nor arguing that it is. Also, for those disposed to question my sincerity regarding the meaningfulness of this quote in my life, all I’ll say is that if there are no dichotomies or ambiguities in your life then you are already beyond the living and just don’t realize it yet.

Resonates with the situation in today’s world:

…man can behave arrogantly not only by deifying his own ego and proclaiming himself the finest flower of matter and life, but equally when he proudly believes that he has correctly comprehended the incomprehensible or uttered the unutterable, or when he thinks up infallible dogmas and with his intellect, which wants to believe, reaches out into regions before which he should lower his eyes and stand in silence (111).

Views on literature:

I still believe that literature has something in common with hope, with a free life outsde the fortress walls which, often unnoticed by us, surround us, with which moreover we surround ourselves. I am not greatly attracted to books whose authors merely portray the hopelessness of our existence, despairing of man, of our conditions, despairing over poverty and riches, over the finiteness of life and the transience of feelings. A writer who doesn’t know anything else had better keep silent (123).

While I do not fully support the sentiments at the end of this quote, in general, I do agree that literature can (and should) provide some form of hope.

Current world, consumerism, trying to fill the void:

The amount of freedom is not increasing in our age, even though it may sometimes seem to be. All that increases is the movement of things, words, garbage and violence. And because nothing can vanish from the face of the planet, the fruits of our activity do not liberate but bury us (130).

…an inner emptiness cannot be filled even with all the objects in the world (137).

The Apocalypse can take different forms. The least dramatic, at first sight, is the one in which man perishes under an avalanche of useless objects, empty words, and excessive activity (145).

On Hoess and the German crematoriums, and the attempt to “cleanse” the world:

The brooms are becoming ever more efficient. The Apocalypse — that is, the cleansing of the world of human beings and of life altogether — is increasingly becoming a mere technical problem (151).

However, the human spirit has not been idle in this revolutionary age: the flames which the cleaners have at their disposal today are capable of simultaneously incinerating any number of people in their own homes (152).

Modern living and society; the soul; the fate of the world:

We break the ancient laws which echo within us and we believe that we may do so with impunity. Surely man, on his road to greater freedom, on his road to his dreamed-of-heaven, should be permitted everything. We are all, each for himself and all together, pursuing the notion of earthly bliss and, in doing so, are piling guilt upon ourselves, even though we refuse to admit it. But what bliss can a man attain with a soul weighed down by guilt? His only way out is to kill the soul within him, and join the crowd of those who roam the world in search of something to fill the void which yawns within them after their soul is dead. Man is no longer conscious of the connection between the way he lives his own life and the fate of the world, which he laments, of which he is afraid, because he suspects that together with the world he is entering the age of the Apocalypse (194).

On being a writer:

Anyone longing to become a writer, for even a few moments of his life, will vainly weave fantastic events unless he has experienced that fall during which he doesn’t know where or whether it will come to an end, and unless his longing for human contact awakens in him the strength to rise, purged, from the ashes (220).

“Cleansing” and the current situation:

It occurred to me that I put on that orange vest for a time because I was longing for a cleansing. Man longs for a cleansing but instead he starts cleaning up his surroundings. But until man cleanses himself he’s wasting his time cleaning up the world around him (223).

I sure wish many of our leaders would learn to cleanse themselves first. Preemptive “cleaning of the world around him” is not only a waste of time, but often dangerous, and quite possibly downright evil.

Again, you really can’t tell much of my psychology or views based on these excerpts. Unless you had read, seen, and heard all of the same things as me, and knew how they affected me and how I have reacted to them, you will not be able to properly understand any of my choices of passages or my comments.

I have only undergone this exercise in the attempt to reach a very few and to highlight some of this book. Do not mistakenly think that these exceprts adequately represent the themes, or the hope, of this book.

Yes, hope. As dismal as many of these exceprts seem, this book does contain hope. It is up to you to find the hope that it contains for yourself.