From Kundera’s Identity:
‘Why are we living? To provide God with human flesh. Because the Bible, my dear lady, does not ask us to seek the meaning of life. It asks us to procreate. Love one another and procreate. Understand this: the meaning of that “love one another” is determined by that “procreate”. That love one another” carries absolutely no implication of charitable love, it only means very simply “make love!”, “copulate!” (he drops his voice and leans towards her) “fuck!”.’ Like a devout disciple, docilely, the lady gazes into his eyes) “That and that alone constitutes the meaning of human life. All the rest is bullshit.”
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“The invention of the locomotive contains the seed of the airplane’s design, which leads ineluctably to the space rocket. That logic is contained in the things themselves, in other words, it is part of the divine project. You can turn in the whole human race for a different one, and still the evolution that leads from the bicycle to the rocket will be just the same. Man is only an operator, not the author of the evolution. And a paltry operator at that, since he doesn’t know the meaning of what he’s operating. That meaning doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to God alone, and we’re here only to obey Him so that He can do what he wants.”
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Nostalgia? 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? (Jean-Marc knew how to answer that: you can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more; if the beloved’s death is, invisibly, already present.).
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Because the gaze of love is the gaze that isolates.
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Thanks to advertising, everydayness has started singing.
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That is why she dislikes dreams: they impose an unacceptable equivalence among the various periods of the same life, a leveling conteporaneity of everything a person has ever experienced; they discredit the present by denying it its privileged status.
