excerpts from Immortality by Milan Kundera

excerpts from Immortality by Milan Kundera, a book that is profoundly clarifying me. this is what makes books incredible, when they enlighten you more perfectly than you ever could have seen yourself alone.

"How then was it possible that she could come to such a silly decision, contrary to all her interests? Did she know her man so poorly? Did she understand him so little? Yes, no matter how strange it may seem, she didn't know him and didn't understand him. She had the feeling that she was always with him, that she was permeated by him. She was therefore certain that she knew him by heart and that nobody had ever known him as well as she. The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other."

"The day she decided to follow him uninvited, she knew she wouldn't arouse any admiration, and she entered his house with a sense of anxiety that caused the brashness of her action, a brashness formerly innocent and even attractive, to become aggressive and forced. She was aware of that, and she resented him for having deprived her of the delight she had felt in her own self, a pleasure that was now shown to have been quite fragile, rootless, and entirely dependent on him, on his love and admiration. Yet something urged her all the more to continue acting eccentrically and foolishly and to provoke him into spitefulness; she felt like causing an explosion."

"'Don't lie to me! Act like a man and at least have the courage to tell me straight out that you're angry with me for coming on my own. I can't stand cowardly men. I'd rather you told me to pack up this minute and go away. So tell me!'
He was at a loss. He shrugged.
'Why are you so cowardly?'
He shrugged again.
'Stop shrugging your shoulders!'
He felt like shrugging a third time, but controlled himself.
He realized that he was behaving foolishly, like a child pestered by his mother, and he hated her for it. He didn't know what to do. He knew how to be pleasant to women, amusing, perhaps even seductive, but he didn't know how to be unkind, nobody had taught him that; on the contrary, everybody had drummed into his head that he must never be unkind to them. How is a man to act toward a woman who comes to his house uninvited? In what university do they teach you that sort of thing?"

"How is it possible that everyone does not still speak of your love? What has happened since then that was more remarkable? What is it that occupies people? You yourself knew the worth of your love; you spoke about it to your greatest poet, so that he should make it human; for it was still but a natural element. But he, in writing to you, dissuaded people from it. They have all read his answers and believe them, because the poet is more comprehensible to them than nature. But perhaps someday it will become clear that here was the limit of his greatness. That lover was bestowed upon him and he was unequal to her. What does it signify that he could not reciprocate? Such love needs no reciprocity, it contains within itself both the challenge and the response; it answers its own prayer. But he should have humbled himself in all his dignity before this love and written what she dictated, with both hands, kneeling, like John on Patmos. There was no choice for him before this voice that 'fulfilled the angels' ministry'; which had come to enfold him and carry him into eternity. Here was a chariot for his fiery ascension. Here was a dark myth for his death, which he left unfulfilled." -- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910

"'That lover was bestowed upon him,' wrote Rilke, and we may wonder: what does this passive construction mean? In other words: who bestowed her upon him? A similar question occurs to us when we read this sentence from Bettina's letter to Goethe, dated June 15, 1807: 'I needn't be afraid to abandon myself to this feeling, for it wasn't I who planted it in my heart.' Who planted it there? Goethe? Surely that is not what Bettina wished to say. The one who planted it in her heart was somebody above both Goethe and herself; if not God, then at least one of those angels invoked by Rilke in the passage quoted.

At this point we can come to Goethe's defense: if somebody (God or angel) planted a feeling in Bettina's heart, it was natural for Bettina to obey that feeling: it was a feeling in her heart, it was her feeling. But it seems that nobody planted such a feeling in Goethe's heart. Bettina was 'bestowed upon him.' Assigned as a task. Then how can Rilke blame Goethe for resisting a task that was assigned to him against his wishes and, so to speak, without any warning whatever? Why should he fall on his knees and write 'with both hands' what a voice from on high was dictating to him?

Obviously, we are not going to find a rational answer and must content ourselves with a comparison: let us think of Simon, fishing in the Sea of Galilee. Jesus approaches him and asks him to abandon his nets and follow him. And Simon replies, 'Leave me alone. I prefer my nets and my fish.' Such a Simon would immediately become a comic figure, a Falstaff of the New Testament, just as in Rilke's eyes Goethe had become a Falstaff of love."