The Road / Cormac McCarthy

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, don't you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
"To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong." Joseph Chilton Pearce

"If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed,
except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I."
Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship"

Saturday, April 3, 2010

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

     He had the same attitude to his life as a sculptor to his statue or a novelist to his novel. One of novelist's inalienable rights is to be able to rework his novel. If he takes a dislike to the beginning, he can rewrite it or cross it out entirely. But Zdena's existence deprived Mirek of his prerogative as an author. Zdena insisted on remaining part of the opening pages of the novel. She refused to be crossed out.  --From Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting


I like this passage. It's about forgetting. And here is why it is funny: "She was ugly." Hence The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.  It may not be funny at all if one has not read the book, or does not know Kundera as an author. He said that humor is "a trustworthy sign of recognition," I believe, between the reader and himself. 
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