I’ve been very productive as of late. The bus ride to and from work gives me time to imbue and digest large amounts of text. I start with the Bible, contemplating verses while gnawing on an apple and sipping cautiously from my thermos of hot dark coffee. After my QT I move to other words. Infinite Regression has seen its share of Kundera related posts–after all, he has firmly ensconced himself as one of my favorite modern authors. That being the case, it is entirely appropriate that another round of Czech Literature swirles its way into my thinking and writing.

My latest endeavor into the work of Mr. Kundera is centred on The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

The Communists’ opponents had no great dream; all they had was a few moral principles, stale and lifeless, to patch up the tattered trousers of the established order. So of course the grandiose enthusiasts won out over the cautious compromisers and lost no time turning their dream into reality: the creation of an idyll of justice for all.

Now let me repeat: an idyll, for all. People have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.

From the start there were people who realized they lacked the proper temperament for the idyll and wished to leave the country. But since by definition an idyll is one world for all, the people who wished to emigrate were implicitly denying its validity. Instead of going abroad, they went behind bars. (8-9)