333

Come, come, whoever you are, Wanderer, worshipper, lover of learning? It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a hundred times Come, come again, come . . .

There is a community of the spirit . . .
Open your hands if you want to be held . . .
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking . . .
Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.

Rumi

332

...Supposedly, astrology teaches us fatalism: you won't escape your fate! But in my view, astrology (please understand, astrology as a metaphor of life) says something far more subtle: you won't escape your life's theme! From this it follows, for example, that is is sheer illusion to want to start all over again, to begin "a new life" that does not resemble the preceding one, to begin, so to speak, from zero. Your life will always be built from the same materials, the same bricks, the same problems, and what will seem to you at first "a new life" will soon turn out to be just a variation of your old existence...
M. Kundera - Immortality (p.275)

331

"I was recently walking down the Rue de Rennes toward the boulevard, and I counted how many times I was able to look at the church without being bumped into by a hurrying passerby or nearly run over by a car. I counted seven very short glances, which cost me a bruised left arm because an impatient young man struck me with his elbow. I was allowed an eighth glance when I stopped in front of the church door and lifted my head. But I saw only the facade, in a highly distorted fish-eye perspective. From such fleeting and deformed views my mind had put together some sort of rough representation that has no more in common with that church than Laura does with my drawing of two arrows. The church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés has disappeared and all the churches in towns have disappeared in the same way, like the moon when it enters an eclipse. The cars that fill the streets have narrowed the sidewalks, which are crowded with pedestrians. If they want to look at each other, the see cars in the background; if they want to look at the building across the street, the see cars in the foreground; there isn;t a single angle of view from which cars will not be visible, from the back, in frint, on both sides. Their omnipresent noise corrodes every moment of contemplation like an acid. Cars have made the former beauty of cities invisible. I am not like thoses stupid moralists who are incensed that ten thousand people are killed each year on the highways. At least there are that many fewer drivers. But I protest that cars have led to the eclipse of cethedrals."
M. Kundera - Immortality (p. 243)

330

Depuis huit jours, j'avais déchiré mes bottines
aux caillous des chemins...
For eight days I had been scraping my shoes
on the stones of the roads...
writes Rimbaud.
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 with another. A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the twp 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 reduces 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...
M. Kundera - Immortality (p.223)

329

...It is part of the definition of feeling that is born in us without our will, often against our will. As soon as we want to feel (decide to feel, just as Don Quixote decided to love Dulcinea), feeling is no longer feeling bur an imitation of feeling, a show of feeling. This is commonly called hysteria. That's why homo sentimentalis (a person who has raised feeling to a value) is in reality identical to homo hystericus.
M.Kundera - Immortality (p.195)

328

is this kitsch?

327

You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.
Banksy