Thursday, July 12, 2012

we were not home

“A la recherché du temps perdu is the constant attempt to charge an entire lifetime with utmost awareness. Proust’s method is actualization, not reflection. He is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true dramas of life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkle and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, and insights that called on us: but we, the masters were not home.”

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

the border

“The woman he loved most in the world (he was thirty at the time) used to tell him (it would make him desperate to hear it) that her life was hanging by a thread. Oh yes, she wanted to live, she loved life, but she also knew that her ‘I want to live’ was spun from the threads of a cobweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for  a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life – and herein lies its secret – takes place in immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.”

Milan Kundera, “The Border,” The Book of Laughter and Forgetting p. 206-207
link
“The woman he loved most in the world (he was thirty at the time) used to tell him (it would make him desperate to hear it) that her life was hanging by a thread. Oh yes, she wanted to live, she loved life, but she also knew that her ‘I want to live’ was spun from the threads of a cobweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for  a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life – and herein lies its secret – takes place in immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.”

Milan Kundera, “The Border,” The Book of Laughter and Forgetting p. 206-207

link
(via journalofanobody)