Uncle Donny pictures are up!
One picture of my sister Meagan and I (more coming soon...)
In the midst of these gloomy Houston days I’ve been dividing my time between reading, writing, watching Jeopardy, monopolizing my Grandmothers computer, exercising, and of course, brooding.
While most of my reading over break has shifted between the extravagance of Fitzgerald and the minimalism of Raymond Carver, the Franco-Czech author Milan Kundera has been something of a fulcrum. His writing seems to wash over you and pass, but later on you feel his words soaking in, haunting you, enraging you, seducing you. You get the idea...
Most of his works deal with human affairs in the shadow of Czechoslovakian-Stalinism, displayed perfectly by his most popular novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
His novels were composed in Czech until around the dissolution of the Soviet empire and then, similar to the shift in political regimes, he began to write in French. Recently I came across a most interesting passage by Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. This book, published in 1978, caused his deprivation of Czechoslovakian citizenship the following year. (Since then he has resided in France, but no one knows exactly where.)
There is an interesting area of linguistics that concerns itself with how a persons vocabulary limits their thought process. Our thoughts are not an abstract stream of consciousness, rather they are bound by concrete words, immutable and finite. Things are of course much more complicated than this (see: Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures), but it seems safe to say that our thoughts and ideas (not emotions though) are composed merely of words we have access to.
So while reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting I happened upon a new word: litost. I agree with Kundera’s assertion that it’s near impossible to understand the human soul without access to such a word. Here is an excerpt:
What is Litost?
Litost is an untranslatable Czech word…As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.
Let me give an example: The student went swimming in the river with his girlfriend, a fellow student. She was athletic, but he was a very poor swimmer…She was madly in love with him and tactfully swam as slowly as he did. But when their swim was coming to an end, she wanted to giver her athletic instincts a few moments’ free rein and headed fro the opposite bank at a rapid crawl. The student made an effort to swim faster too and swallowed water. Feeling humbled, his physical inferiority laid bare, he felt litost.
He recalled his sickly childhood, lacking in physical exercise and spent under the gaze of his mother’s overfond eye, and fell into despair about himself and his life. They walked back to the city together in silence on a country lane. Wounded and humiliated, he felt an irresistible desire to hit her.
“What’s the matter with you” she asked him and he started to reproach her: she knew about the current near the other bank, and that he had forbidden her to swim there because of the risk of drowning—and then he slapped her face. The girl began to cry, and when he saw the tears on her cheeks, he took pity on her and put his arms around her, and his litost melted away.
Or take an instance from the student’s childhood: His parents made him take violin lessons. He was not very gifted and his teacher would interrupt him to criticize his mistakes in a cold, unbearable voice. He felt humiliated, and he wanted to cry. But instead of trying to play in tune and not make mistakes, he would deliberately play wrong notes, the teacher voice would become still more unbearable and harsh, and he himself would sink deeper and deeper into his litost.
What then is litost?
Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.
One of the customary remedies for misery is love. Because someone loved absolutely cannot be miserable. All his faults are redeemed by love’s magical gaze, under which even inept swimming, with the head held high above the surface, can become charming…
Anyone with wide experience of the common imperfection of mankind is relatively sheltered from the shocks of litost. For him, the sight of his own misery is ordinary and uninteresting. Litost, therefore, is characteristic of the age of inexperience. It is one of the ornaments of youth.
