E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten
Kundera Immortality
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-36769-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
'An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere' (Salman Rushdie)
E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-36769-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The French-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in the Czech Republic and has lived in France since 1975. He died in Paris in 2023.
Weitere Infos & Material
The elevator took her to the top floor of the high-rise, that housed the health club with its big swimming pool, Jacuzzi, sauna, Turkish bath, and view of Paris. Rock music boomed from speakers in the locker room. Ten years ago, when she first started coming, the club had fewer members and it was quiet. Then, year by year, the club improved: more and more glass, more lights, more artificial flowers and cactuses, more speakers, more music, and also more and more people, further multiplied by the enormous mirrors which the management one day decided to spread across the walls of the gym.
She opened a locker and began to undress. Two women were chatting close by. One of them was complaining in a quiet, slow alto voice that her husband was in the habit of leaving everything lying on the floor: books, socks, newspapers, even matches and pipes. The other, in a soprano, spoke twice as fast; the French habit of raising the last syllable of a sentence an octave higher made the flow of her speech sound like the indignant cackling of a hen: ‘I’m shocked to hear you say that! I’m disappointed in you! I’m really shocked! You’ve got to put your foot down! Don’t let him get away with it! It’s your house, after all! You’ve got to put your foot down! Don’t let him walk all over you!’ The other woman, as if torn between a friend whose authority she respected and a husband whom she loved, explained with melancholy: ‘What can I do, that’s how he is! And he’s always been like that. Ever since I’ve known him, leaving things all over the place!’ ‘So then he’s got to stop doing it! It’s your house! You can’t let him get away with it! You’ve got to make that crystal clear!’ said the soprano voice.
Agnes never took part in such conversations; she never spoke badly of Paul, even though she sensed that this alienated her somewhat from other women. She turned her head in the direction of the alto: she was a young woman with light hair and the face of an angel.
‘No, no! You know perfectly well you’re in the right! You can’t let him act like that!’ continued the other woman and Agnes noticed that as she spoke she kept rapidly shaking her head from left to right and right to left, at the same time lifting her shoulders and eyebrows, as if expressing indignant astonishment that someone had refused to respect her friend’s human rights. Agnes knew that gesture: her daughter, Brigitte, shook her head and lifted her brows in precisely the same way.
Agnes undressed, closed the locker and walked through the swing doors into a tiled hall, with showers on one side and a glass-enclosed sauna on the other. There, women sat squeezed together on long wooden benches. Some were wrapped in special plastic sheets that formed an airtight cover around their bodies (or certain parts of the body, most often the belly and behind), so that the skin would perspire all the more readily and the women would believe they would lose weight more quickly.
She climbed to the highest bench, where there was still some room. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. The noise of music did not reach this far, but the voices of the women, who chattered away at full blast, were just as loud. An unfamiliar young woman entered the sauna and the moment she walked through the door began to order everyone about; she made them all sit closer together, then she picked up a pitcher and poured water on the stones. With much hissing hot steam started to rise, making the woman sitting next to Agnes wince with pain and cover her face. The newcomer noticed it, declared, ‘I like hot steam; it gives me that real sauna feeling,’ squeezed herself between two naked bodies and at once began to talk about yesterday’s television talk show featuring a famous biologist who had just published his memoirs. ‘He was terrific,’ she said.
Another woman nodded in agreement: ‘Oh yes! And how modest!’
The newcomer said: ‘Modest? Didn’t you realize how extremely proud that man was? But I like that kind of pride! I adore proud people!’ She turned to Agnes: ‘Did you find him modest?’
Agnes said that she hadn’t seen the programme. As if interpreting this remark as veiled disagreement, the newcomer repeated very loudly, looking Agnes straight in the eye: ‘I detest modesty! Modesty is hypocrisy!’
Agnes shrugged and the newcomer said: ‘In a sauna I’ve got to feel real heat. I’ve got to work up a good sweat. But then I must have a cold shower. A cold shower! I adore that! Actually I like my showers cold even in the morning. I find hot showers disgusting.’
Soon she declared that the sauna was suffocating; after repeating once more how she hated modesty she got up and left.
As a little girl, Agnes used to go for walks with her father and once she asked him whether he believed in God. Father answered: ‘I believe in the Creator’s computer.’ This answer was so peculiar that the child remembered it. The word computer was peculiar, and so was the word Creator, for Father would never say God but always Creator as if he wanted to limit God’s significance to his engineering activity. The Creator’s computer: but how could a person communicate with a computer? So she asked her father whether he ever prayed. He said: ‘That would be like praying to Edison when a lightbulb burns out.’
Agnes thought to herself: the Creator loaded a detailed program into the computer and went away. That God created the world and then left it to a forsaken humanity trying to address him in an echoless void – this idea isn’t new. Yet it is one thing to be abandoned by the God of our forefathers and another to be abandoned by God the inventor of a cosmic computer. In his place, there is a program which is ceaselessly running in his absence, without anyone being able to change anything whatever. To load a program into the computer: this does not mean that the future has been planned down to the last detail, that everything is written ‘up above’. For example, the program did not specify that in 1815 a battle would be fought near Waterloo and that the French would be defeated, but only that man is aggressive by nature, that he is condemned to wage war and that technical progress would make war more and more terrible. Everything else is without importance from the Creator’s point of view and is only a play of permutations and combinations within a general program which is not a prophetic anticipation of the future but merely sets the limits of possibilities within which all power of decision has been left to chance.
That was the same with the project we call mankind. The computer did not plan an Agnes or a Paul, but only a prototype known as a human being, giving rise to a large number of specimens which are based on the original model and haven’t any individual essence. Just like a Renault car. Its essence is deposited outside, in the archives of the central engineering office. Individual cars differ only in their serial numbers. The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.
Agnes recalled the newcomer who had just declared that she hated hot showers. She came in order to inform all the women present that (1) she likes saunas to be hot (2) she adores pride (3) she can’t bear modesty (4) she loves cold showers (5) she hates hot showers. With these five strokes she had drawn her self-portrait, with these five points she defined her self and presented that self to everyone. And she didn’t present it modestly (she said, after all, that she hated modesty!), but belligerently. She used passionate verbs such as ‘adore’ and ‘detest’, as if she wished to proclaim her readiness to fight for every one of those five strokes, for every one of those five points.
Why all this passion? Agnes asked herself, and she thought: When we are thrust out into the world just as we are, we first have to identify with that particular throw of the dice, with that accident organized by the divine computer: to get over our surprise that precisely this (what we see facing us in the mirror) is our self. Without the faith that our face expresses our self, without that basic illusion, that arch-illusion, we cannot live or at least we cannot take life seriously. And it isn’t enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way can we regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence. That’s the reason why the newcomer needed not only to draw her self-portrait but also to make it clear to all that it embodied something unique and irreplaceable, something worth fighting or even dying for.
After spending a quarter of an hour in the heat of the sauna, Agnes rose and took a dip in a small pool filled with ice-cold water. Then she lay down to rest in the lounge, surrounded by other women who even here never stopped talking.
She wondered what kind of existence the computer had programmed for life after death.
Two possibilities came to mind. If the computer’s field of activity is limited to our planet, and if our fate depends on it alone, then we cannot count on anything after death except some permutation of what we have already experienced in life; we shall again encounter similar landscapes and beings....
