Author: Milan Kundera
motifs
- Beethoven
- Vertigo
- Lightness and weight
- Body and soul
notes
Mind-boggling good, makes you really think hard about the emptiness of life. Dichotomies, lightness and weight, body and soul… But if it’s meaningless, isn’t that precisely what makes it meaningful…? An inconsequential spark, an ephemeral dewdrop at dawn…
I love this book’s observations on psychology, philosophy, motivations, and desires.
- Lightness, weight, and the emptiness of love
- Kundera’s descriptions of Tereza reflect Schiller’s simplicity
- Vertigo is the fear of the desire to fall
- The body is a ship in which the soul sails
- Fortuity creates motifs of life, which is composed like music
- Authenticity of privacy
- Love is vulnerability
I noticed that the author also uses repeated motifs throughout the novel. In this way, he composes his story like the individual composes life.
highlights
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come – p. 8