“He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
Milan Kundera
from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
“Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known since childhood.”
translated by Michael Henry Heim
from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
“And again he thought the thought we already know: Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can only make one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.
History is similar to individual lives in this respect…..
….History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”
translated by Michael Henry Heim
from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine–to dream about things that have not happened–is among mankind’s deepest needs.
Leonard Durso 