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178 On Communism:
Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise.
到后来,他们发现没有天堂。可是他们却在过程中如此英勇地实践这条路以至于双手沾满了鲜血,变成了杀人犯。虽然被指责,他们却用不知无罪为自己辩护。
Yet Tomas thought there was no one more innocent than Oedipus, and that the Communists should put their eyes out and wander away from Thebes.
143 Flirtation:
One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
【Tomas】Love and lovemaking were two different things.
【Tereza】Books-emblem of the secret brotherhood
155
For what made the soul so excited was that body was acting against its will; the body was betraying it, and the soul was looking on.
156 Toilets:
...We are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments.
160 The moment love is born:
The woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
161 Tereza's screams during intercourse:
It was meant to be blind and deafen the senses. With time she screamed less, but her soul was still blinded by love, and saw nothing.
161
The blotch, which until then she had regarded as the most prosaic of skin blemishes, had become an obsession. She longed to see it again and again in that implausible proximity to an alien penis.... She had no desire to see another man's organs. She wished to see her own private parts in close proximity to an alien penis. She did not desire her lover's body. She desired her her own body, newly discovered, intimate and alien beyond all others, incomparably exciting.
167 the omnipresent roof:
Only a few weeks earlier, she had scoffed at Prechazka for failing to see that he lived in a concentration camp, where privacy ceased to exist. But what about her? By getting out from under her mother's roof, she thought in all innocence that she had once and for all become master of her privacy. But no, her mother's rood stretched out over the whole world and would never let her be. Tereza would never escape her.
169 loves are like empires:
What would happen if Tomas were to receive such a picture? Would he throw her out? Perhaps not. Probably not. But the fragile edifice of their love would certainly come tumbling down. For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
170 物是人非:
She wanted to see the Vltava. She wanted to stand on its banks and look long and hard into its waters, because the sight of the flow was soothing and healing. The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
175
..., he had the irrepressible feeling that she was a child who had been put in a bulrush basket and sent downstream to him. Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins when a woman enters her first words into our poetic memory.
184 Overwhelmed by the unbearable:
People talked about him inside and outside the hospital; although he knew about it, he could do nothing to stop it. He was surprised at how unbearable he found it, how panic-stricken it made him feel. The interest they showed in him was as unpleasant as a elbowing crowd or the pawings of the people who tear our clothes off in nightmares.
185 Maintaining nonbelief:
How defenseless we are in the face of flattery! Tomas was unable to prevent himself from taking seriously what the Ministry official said... When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true, that nothing is sincere. Maintaining nonbelief requires a tremendous effort and the proper training-in other words, frequent police interrogations. Tomas lacked that training.
193 Categorization of ppl?
The surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity... An actor is someone who in early life consents to exhibit himself for the rest of his life to an anonymous public. Without that basic content, which had nothing to do with talent, which goes deeper than talent, no one can become an actor. Thus, a profession is determined by an inner desire.
199 Small gap of the unimaginable:
When he saw a woman in her clothes, he could naturally imagine more or less what she looked like naked, but between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest....The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
In fact, Tomas defines "sexuality" as a strongbox hiding the mystery of a woman's "I", and it was a desire not for pleasure (which to him was a bonus), but for the possession of the world that drove him in his pursuit for woman.
208 poetic memory:
A part of our brain that records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. His adventure with Tereza began at the exact point where his adventures with other woman left off. He had no desire to uncover anything in her with the imaginary scalpel. Before he wondered, he loved her.
219
And now she (Tereza) was with him (Tomas) again. He saw her pressing the crow wrapped in red to her breast. The image of her brought him peace. It seemed to tell him that Tereza was alive, that she was with him in the same city, and that nothing else counted.
219 the one criterion:
She, born of six fortuities, she, the blossom sprung from the chief surgeon's sciatica, she, the reverse side of all his "Es muss sein!"-she was the only thing he cared about.
221 how characters are created:
Characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else had discovered or said something essential about... I (author) have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one had crossed a boarder that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about.
223:
What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind's fateful inexperience. History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.
236 the clockwork of the head:
two cogwheels turn opposite each other. On the one, images; on the other, the body's reactions. The cog carrying the image of a naked woman meshes with the corresponding erection-command cog. But for some reason or the other the wheels go out of phase and the excitement cog meshes with a cog bearing the image of a swallow in flight, the penis rises at the sight of a swallow... Tomas thought: Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had... a world where man is excited by seeing a swallow and Tomas can love Tereza without being disturbed by the aggressive stupidity of sex. Then he fell asleep.
238 Plato's myth:
People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
248 categorical agreement with being:
Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.
Kitsch:
Kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that humans find difficult with which to come to terms, offering instead a sanitized view of the world, in which "all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions". In its desire to paper over the complexities and contradictions of real life, kitsch is intimately linked with totalitarianism. In a healthy democracy, diverse interest groups compete and negotiate with one another to produce a generally acceptable consensus; by contrast, "everything that infringes on kitsch," including individualism, doubt, and irony, "must be banished for life" in order for kitsch to survive. Therefore, whenever a single political movement corners power we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
254:
The true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it. In fact, that was exactly how Sabina had explained the meaning of her paintings to Tereza: on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through.
268:
There are situations in which people are condemned to playact. Their struggle with mute power is the struggle of a theater company that has attacked an army.
287 man the cow parasite:
Man is as much a parasite on the cow as the tapeworm is on man: We have sucked their udders like leeches. "Man the cow parasite" is probably how non-man defines man in his zoology books.
289 true human goodness:
We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions-love, antipathy, charity, or malice-and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals. True human goodness can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Man's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
290:
Tereza keeps appearing before my eyes. I see her sitting on the stump petting Karenin's head and ruminating on mankind's debacles. Another image also comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman's very eyes, put his arms around the horse's neck and burst into tears.
295 paradise:
Life in paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom...But most of all: No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-rising scenes; it knows no development. Karenin surrounded Tereza and Tomas with a life based on repetition, and he expected the same from them.
314:
The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
来自: 豆瓣 |
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