“If our lives were endless, like the lives of the gods of antiquity, the concept of episode would lose its meaning, for in infinity every event, no matter how trivial, would meet up with its consequence and unfold into a story.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“No episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure. Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“Life is as stuffed with episodes as a mattress is with horsehair, but a poet (according to Aristotle) is not an upholsterer and must remove all stuffing from his story, even though real life consists of nothing but precisely such stuffing.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“In Aristotle’s Poetics, the episode is an important concept. Aristotle did not like episodes. According to him, an episode, from the point of view of poetry, is the worst possible type of event. It is neither an unavoidable consequence of preceding action nor the cause of what is to follow: it is outside the causal chain of events that is the story. It is merely a sterile accident that can be left out without making the story lose its intelligible continuity and is incapable of making a permanent mark upon the life of the characters.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“Isn’t the cause of most bad paintings and bad novels simply the fact that artists consider their passion for art something holy, some sort of mission if not duty (duty to oneself, even to mankind)?” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“Road: a strip of ground over which one walks. A highway differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point to another. A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A highway is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time. Before roads and paths disappeared from the landscape, they had disappeared from the human soul: man stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and to enjoy it. What’s more, he no longer saw his own life as a road, but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of widow. Time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be overcome by ever greater speed.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn’t know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn’t even know how to be dead.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi, emphasis in original)
“He that, renouncing righteousness and the good, devotes himself to pleasure solely, is like a man that falling asleep on top of a tree, wakes when he has fallen down.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Kishkindhakanda Sarga 38
“The more the fight for human rights gains in popularity, the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone toward everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights. The world has become man’s right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speed limit the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“War can only exist in a world of tragedy; from the beginning of history man has known only a tragic world and has not been capable of stepping out of it. The age of tragedy can be ended only by the revolt of frivolity.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“A man can take his own life. But he cannot take his own immortality. As soon as immortality has you aboard, you can’t get off, and even if you shoot yourself you’ll stay on deck along with your suicide.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“Does love for art really exist and has it ever existed? Is it not a delusion? When Lenin proclaimed that he loved Beethoven’s Appassionata above all else, what was it that he really loved? What did he hear? Music? Or a majestic noise that reminded him of the solemn stirrings in his soul, a longing for blood, brotherhood, executions, justice, and the absolute? Did he derive joy from the tones, or from the musings stimulated by those tones, which had nothing to do with art or with beauty?” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“Up to a certain moment our death seems too distant for us to occupy ourselves with it. It is unseen and invisible. That is the first, happy period of life. But then we suddenly begin to see our death ahead of us and we can no longer keep ourselves from thinking about it. It is with us. And because immortality sticks to death as tightly as Laurel to Hardy, we can say that our immortality is with us, too. And the moment we know it is with us we feverishly begin to look after it. We have a formal suit made for it, we buy a new tie for it, worried that others might select the clothes and tie, and select badly.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“Nothing is more useful than to adopt the status of a child: a child can do whatever it likes, for it is innocent and inexperienced; it need not observe the rules of social behavior, for it has not yet entered a world ruled by form; it may show its feelings, whether they are appropriate or not.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“The whole art of politics these days lies not in running the polis (which runs itself by the logic of its own dark and uncontrollable mechanism), but in thinking up ‘sound bites’ by which the politician is seen and understood, measured in opinion polls, and elected or rejected in elections.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
“In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things in life are earning one’s living so as not to be a parasite, and loving one’s neighbor.” — W. H. Auden
High Street 8 — “Plus ça Change” is posted today.
That is the end of High Street. Thanks for tuning in. Please tune in tomorrow and every day for whatever comes next.
“There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.” — Milan Kundera, Immortality (trans. Kussi)
High Street 7.4 — “Freedom’s Just Another Word” (fin.) is posted today.
(Tomorrow: High Street 8 — “Plus ça Change”)
“Every writer is offering a true account of the activities of the mind.” — Donald Barthelme (from Not-Knowing, ed. Herzinger)
High Street 7.3 — “Freedom’s Just Another Word” (cont.) is posted today.
(Tomorrow: High Street 7.4 — “Freedom’s Just Another Word” (fin.))
“There’s nothing so beautiful as having a very difficult problem. It gives purpose to life.” — Donald Barthelme (from Not-Knowing, ed. Herzinger)
High Street 7.2 — “Freedom’s Just Another Word” (cont.) is posted today.
(Tomorrow: High Street 7.3 — “Freedom’s Just Another Word” (cont.))
“If we want to go on existing we need to summon up all our strength in order to wrench ourselves off the spot where we’re stuck.” — Thomas Bernhard, Concrete
High Street 7.1 — “Freedom’s Just Another Word” is posted today.
(Tomorrow: High Street 7.2 — “Freedom’s Just Another Word” (cont.))
“A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.” — Karl Kraus, quoted in Not-Knowing, ed. Herzinger
High Street 6.8 — “Life During Wartime” (fin.) is posted today.
(Tomorrow: High Street 7.1 — “Freedom’s Just Another Word”)
“Mighty is the sin that arises from the destruction of one who has been offered shelter.” — Valmiki Ramayana, Kishkindha Kanda, Sarga 12
High Street 6.7 — “Life During Wartime” (cont.) is posted today.
(Tomorrow: High Street 6.8 — “Life During Wartime” (fin.))
“Writing should be playing.” — Donald Barthelme (from Not-Knowing, ed. Herzinger)
High Street 6.6 — “Life During Wartime” (cont.) is posted today.
(Tomorrow: High Street 6.7 — “Life During Wartime” (cont.))
“The four social classes under late capitalism are artists, rich people, the middle class, [and] poor people—this being the order of rank and precedence. As the dominant class (morally/intellectually speaking), artists have a clear social responsibility to care for and nurture the three lower classes. This is not by any means their primary responsibility, which is of course to art, but neither is it a negligible one.” — Donald Barthelme, “On the Level of Desire” (from Not-Knowing, ed. Herzinger)
High Street 6.5 — “Life During Wartime” (cont.) is posted today.
(Tomorrow: High Street 6.6 — “Life During Wartime” (cont.))
“Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art.” — Donald Barthelme, “On the Level of Desire” (from Not-Knowing, ed. Herzinger)
High Street 6.4 — “Life During Wartime” (cont.) is posted today.
(Tomorrow: High Street 6.5 — “Life During Wartime” (cont.))
“Where does desire go? Always a traveling salesperson, desire goes hounding off into the trees, frequently, without direction from its putative master or mistress. This is tragic and comic at the same time. I should, in a well-ordered world, marry the intellectual hero my wicked uncle has selected for me. Instead I run off with William of Ockham or Daffy Duck.” — Donald Barthelme, “On the Level of Desire” (from Not-Knowing, ed. Herzinger)
High Street 6.3 — “Life During Wartime” (cont.) is posted today.
(Tomorrow: High Street 6.4 — “Life During Wartime” (cont.))