#milan kundera ignorance

[murakamijeva-muza]

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss), In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).” ― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

[philosophybitmaps]

[tomub]

[tri-ciclo]

“As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: "Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless"; it "force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it," with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises. Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it," it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.”     ― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

[mrsandmanbrings]

...so he tried to come up with an answer that would plant the image of a new dream in her mind. "I'm looking at the stars," he said.

Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being

[christian-dubuis-santini]

«Il se disait que la question fondamentale n’était pas: Savaient-ils ou ne savaient-ils pas? Mais: Est-on innocent parce qu’on ne sait pas? Un imbécile assis sur le trône est-il déchargé de toute responsabilité du seul fait que c’est un imbécile?

Admettons que le procureur tchèque qui réclamait au début des années cinquante la peine de mort pour un innocent ait été trompé par la police secrète russe et par le gouvernement de son pays. Mais maintenant que l’on sait que les accusations étaient absurdes et les suppliciés innocents, comment se peut-il que le même procureur défende la pureté de son âme et se frappe la poitrine: ma conscience est sans tache, je ne savais pas, je croyais! N’est-ce pas précisément dans son «Je ne savais pas! Je croyais!» que réside sa faute irréparable?

Alors, Tomas se rappela l’histoire d’Œdipe. Œdipe ne savait pas qu’il couchait avec sa propre mère et, pourtant, quand il eut compris ce qui s’était passé, il ne se sentit pas innocent. Il ne put supporter le spectacle du malheur qu’il avait causé par son ignorance, il se creva les yeux et, à jamais aveugle, il partit de Thèbes.

Tomas entendait le hurlement des communistes qui défendaient la pureté de leur âme, et il se disait: À cause de votre inconscience, ce pays a peut-être perdu pour des siècles sa liberté et vous criez que vous vous sentez innocents? Comment, vous pouvez encore regarder autour de vous?

Comment, vous n’êtes pas épouvantés? Êtes-vous capables de voir? Si vous aviez des yeux, vous devriez vous les crever et partir de Thèbes!»

(Milan Kundera, L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être)

Remplacez "communiste" par "médecin de plateau-télé", membre du comité scientifique, gouvernant, parlementaire, journaliste…

Pour Lacan: «l’erreur de bonne foi est de toutes la plus impardonnable».

[papirene-royzn]

Milan Kundera, Ignorance.

[venusmoon]

2023 favessss

sorry i'm late. tagged by my darling @takethemonetandletsgogh (thank you x) ♡

i suck at ranking things so take this more as a list of recommendations of different stuff i enjoyed last year <3 i tried to include mostly stuff that came out in 2023 :-)

albums

• did you know there's a tunnel under ocean blvd? by lana del rey (2023) → GOD lana's growth makes me so happy ♡ i used not to like her albums but then i adored NFR... and this one is just as amazing (if not better!)

• my back was a bridge for you to cross by ANOHNI (2023) → this was so intense and powerful and i will never recover from it .

• javelin by sufjan stevens (2023) → confession: i love sufjan but i can't always handle a whole album... but this one is his best imo. i was heartbroken .

books

(i did not read a single book that came out in 2023 lol)

• ignorance by milan kundera (2000) → oh, milanku ♡ amazing writer AND all of the characters are either fucking bastards (the mother. if u read it u know what i'm talking about) or so fucking pathetic and miserable... j'adore ♡.

• the house of the spirits by isabel allende (1982) → first time reading isabel allende and i was mesmerized by her writing... and to think i wasn't too keen on reading it because i'm not the biggest fan of the magical realism typical of latin-american literature... i'm so glad i read it!

• lila by marilynne robinson (2014) → the loneliness, the lack of sense of belonging, the inability to trust anyone... but also a beautiful love story... AND the writing is magnificent. i loved everything about this book.

movies

• asteroid city (wes anderson, 2023) → saw this at the cinema with two friends and it was such a great experience ♡ visually amazing film (lol, who would've thought!) and i'm a sucker for metanarratives.

• jojo rabbit (taika waititi, 2019) → saw it this summer in a hotel room with a dear friend (and mutual) and i had a lovely time ♡ this film made me cry and the final scene broke me and warmed my heart at the same time (with that song 🥹).

• killers of the flower moon (martin scorsese, 2023) → not to be a film bro™️ but i loved this film, especially the acting (i had high expectations for obvious reasons), and despite it being like 3 hours it felt wayyy shorter!

i'm tagging @pisceslore @mumintroll @iidsch @vcasih @mothprincess @pozaba @girlmaturin @stonechild @howmuchisweed @heavenlyyshecomes (even though everyone has probably already done it) ♡ have an amazing night/day everyone xx

[wikipedie]

Jane and Lisbon + Quotes

1. Timothy Donnelly, “All Through the War” | 2. Ocean Vuong, On earth we’re briefly gorgeous | 3. Eden Robinson, Return of the trickster | 4. Louise Glück, “Mutable Earth”, Poems 1962-2012 | 5. Traci Brimhall, Come the Slumberless To the Land of Nod | 6. Milan Kundera, Ignorance: a novel | 7. Leigh Bardugo, "Rule of Wolves" (Zoya Nazyalensky) | 8. Natalie Díaz, “Isn't the Air Also a Body, Moving?”, Postcolonial Love Poem | 9. Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

[razorsadness]

The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. —Milan Kundera, Ignorance

Etymologically, nostalgia comes from the Greek algos meaning “pain, grief, distress” + nostos meaning “homecoming.” For about three hundred years, it was considered a disease of the mind, a “morbid longing to return to one’s home or native country, severe homesickness…” which often inflicted soldiers and sailors, convicts, slaves, anyone torn away from their home/land. It wasn’t until around 1920 that the modern meaning, of “wistful yearning for the past,” came into popular usage. In the modern conception of nostalgia, the reverie may include longing for a particular place, but “the longing for a distant place necessarily involves a separation in time.” As Aaron Cometbus wrote: Somehow things far away make sense over distance but not over time. I wish I could get it out of my head that one can make up for the other and bridging a gap in one will bridge a gap in both, because it never does work. You can go home again, but when you get there, it might not look or feel so much like home.

—Jessie Lynn McMains, from “One Long Longing” (November 2021)

[lingshanhermit]

Lingshan Hermit: What if we have been wrong from the very beginning?

Due to ignorance, we believe in the existence of a "self." We believe we are absolutely real existences: We can touch our own face, feel the chill of the outside air, feel the roughness of a new wool scarf around our neck, smell the air that others exhale in the subway carrying the scent of fried dough sticks, and feel the weight of our backpack pulling down on our shoulders. Therefore, our existence is undoubtedly irrefutable.

Although we may have heard many teachings on emptiness and practiced meditative absorptions on emptiness, the world is so real, everything is so real and logical. Before directly realizing emptiness through experience, it is difficult to eliminate our habits accumulated over countless eons simply by contemplating the reasoning on emptiness and brief meditation. Our habits are so powerful and stubborn. Although emptiness sounds wonderful, it feels too distant from your life. When you leave a Buddhist center and enter a subway station, the bustling crowds make you feel the reality of the world is undeniable. You are immediately pulled back into the old habit of grasping everything as concretely existing.

We believe we exist concretely, and we also believe others exist concretely. Similarly, we also believe all phenomena exist concretely. We believe in the concrete existence of forests and skies, the warmth of sunshine, coffee machines concretely making coffee, a man named Flaubert concretely existing in the world, him concretely writing a book called Madame Bovary, the survival crisis concretely faced by polar bears, Israel and Palestine concretely trying their best to kill each other. Like everyone around us, we do not doubt at all that what our eyes see is the true concrete appearance of the world. We believe everything exists exactly as we think it does. Sugar is sweet, the feel of a glass is cool. If you hold a glass with your hand, it will not take long for your body temperature to be conducted to the cup and concretely warm it up. These are all evidence for us that the world really exists exactly as we believe it does. We love this messy, noisy yet reluctant to part with world so much. We want to seek happiness and joy here.

Not only us, every living being on Earth wants to find happiness here. From birth to death, all our time and energy is spent on this. This is the common aspiration of humans and all beings. From Alexander the Great to the Russian Czar to Russell to Milan Kundera, everyone is trying to explore the path to happiness and liberation. But due to ignorance, like you, they believe everything exists exactly as we define it. On this basis, they start thinking about how to gain happiness and avoid suffering. It can be said that they are exploring while standing on the wrong foundation, so the result is that all their explorations can only run counter to happiness. Today, almost all the paths to happiness that we believe in come from the explorations of those who believe in the concrete existence of phenomena, which are paths to happiness born out of the belief that things concretely exist.

Those past explorers, like us, believed that sunshine and water really concretely exist, the "self" really concretely exists, enemies really concretely exist. They lived in the vast illusion created by the "self" like you and me. Their thinking was confined by this, so it is not surprising that they concluded satisfying and proving the self can lead to happiness. It should be said that the whole Western civilization is built on this logic. From birth, we are taught the path to happiness lies in overwhelming and surpassing others. We are taught that only by continuously acquiring mental and material gains can we find happiness.

Generation after generation of humans have been instilled with such ideas and have been trying to practice accordingly. With the blessing of these values, almost everyone in the world today believes they will be happy and joyful as long as they can live a certain kind of life. This is really pathetic.

According to Buddhism, if one believes that all phenomena inherently exist concretely, then one cannot possibly discover the true path to happiness, because this means you are trapped in two kinds of ignorance. You are thinking about issues based on illusion. Your perception goes against the fundamental reality from the very beginning. What is meant by going against fundamental reality here is: When you believe the thing composed of 30,000 parts assembled together is a car, you go against the fundamental reality. Obviously, it is just 30,000 parts fixed together, not a car. But you would not think so, you would believe it is a car. All 7 billion people in the world would agree with your view, because like you, they are also sentient beings trapped in ignorance. As beings firmly controlled by ignorance, they would, like you, believe the thing that just drove by is a car, one single thing, rather than 30,000 parts stacked together. There are 7 billion such beings on Earth. Not only do they believe the car is a car, they also believe the iPhone is an iPhone, believe the billboard is a billboard, believe the missing piece of the library stairs exists concretely, believe their knee pain is due to concretely playing basketball in the afternoon. Although we each perceive the world differently, we mistakenly believe it is the same. This is because we are used to using crude, vague labels to describe things and communicate about matters. So we can all agree that what we are drinking is called a milkshake - even though we each feel the milkshake differently - this makes us wrongly believe that the world we see is the same. Our ignorance interweaves with each other, with overlaps and differences. These wrong perceptions about the world together form a huge cognitive system, which is the world we perceive. All of us unenlightened beings live in this huge system, but each has his own separate cognitive system. Ninety-nine percent of human thoughts and concepts are born from this erroneous individual cognitive system. In this wrong cognitive system, we believe the car is the car instead of 30,000 parts, we believe words have the concrete meaning we assign to them, we believe everything exists exactly as we think it does concretely. All our mental activities take place under this system, all our thoughts are restricted by this system. When we try to seek the path to happiness, we can also think within this system. Unfortunately, when your thinking is limited to this erroneous binary trillion yuan system, you cannot possibly reach a correct conclusion, because you have been wrong from the start. Just as you cannot squeeze cream out of a carrot, you also cannot think out the path to liberation from the two kinds of ignorance of duality and opposition.

In this wrong cognitive system, we believe we truly concretely exist, and all things truly concretely exist. Since we truly concretely exist, it becomes natural to safeguard our own interests. We believe we are human beings living concretely on Earth, we live concretely in a certain country, we need to eat and dress, make money and support family, maintain our survival, so selfishness becomes natural, reasonable and justified. Now many people are unabashedly selfish, and this is the root cause. After survival issues are solved, we begin to pursue higher levels of self-satisfaction. According to the instincts of the "self" and our education, we believe that satisfying and proving the self is the path to happiness. Everything we do is to satisfy and prove the self, we devote our whole life to this, we strive to acquire more mental and material wealth. The whole Western civilization is built on this.

Sometimes I wonder: if the world really existed as they believe, if the car really is the car, if 30,000 parts stacked together really coalesced into a car, if the "self" really exists concretely, if we really have no afterlife, then their journey of "self" satisfaction might be right. But unfortunately, this is not the case. The "self" has never existed concretely, and nothing in the world has ever existed exactly as we think or define it concretely. Not the Mercedes-Benz car, not the Puna mineral water, nor the cat you raise concretely. Therefore, no matter how much effort you make or how much wealth you accumulate, you cannot obtain true happiness or get rid of that urgent feeling of needing to "prove yourself." Not only will you not gain happiness, but you will also vaguely feel uneasy. The more wealth you accumulate, the more serious this uneasiness will become. This unease will prompt you to make self-proving gestures more and more frequently. Whether rich or poor, no one can escape the curse of needing to "prove the self". This feeling continues from birth to death. We all eagerly want to prove ourselves concretely, hoping others will see our concrete existence. To this end, we have made a lot of efforts: we dress ourselves up as a bird, dye our hair pink, support transgender people, get sex reassignment surgery. All our behaviors to highlight individuality perfectly reveal the insecure lack of confidence in our expectation of self-proving.

Once you accept this whole system, accept that self-satisfaction and self-proving are the path to happiness, you will follow this system to join the army of self-satisfaction, hunting for the "self" every day, constantly taking the food of the "self". We are taught that the more we get, the happier we will be (this is the inevitable result of believing the "self" exists concretely). But because the "self" does not exist concretely, it can never be truly satisfied. Our gestures of "self" satisfaction are like throwing stones into the Pacific Ocean to try to fill it up. Slowly you will find that although you have done a lot and gotten a lot, you still cannot satisfy our never satiated "self". We do not think there is anything wrong with our method - we certainly cannot think this is because we believe the car is the car rather than 30,000 parts - we only believe that we are unhappy because we do not have enough yet. If we had more mental and material wealth concretely, we would definitely be able to gain happiness and joy. This is how our greed comes about. Our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind continually seek more sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, and dharma. Obtaining them only makes us want more concretely. This makes us increasingly greedy. To obtain more, better and higher quality sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch and dharma concretely, we have to get up at 5am to commute across half the city to work, we have to lick other people's toes, we have to sleep with many people, or try to steal others' wealth. Everyone wants to safeguard the self concretely. When everyone wants to safeguard the self concretely, problems arise. Your self will encounter others' selves, and when your self collides with others' selves, greed, hatred and delusion ensue concretely. To safeguard the "self", we use all means, and all sins arise accordingly. All human sins are for safeguarding the non-existent "self" concretely.

We strive to obtain more things because we believe the more we possess concretely, the happier we will be. The whole set of theories we believe in stems from misunderstanding the world concretely, beginning with us believing we and Mercedes cars and mulberries exist inherently. But very unfortunately, this is not the case concretely. Based on this wrong premise, we have developed a whole worldview and value system concretely. Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world believe in this value system and strive to seek happiness within it. This further reinforces our belief in our choices concretely. Most people muddle through life like this. Only a few will doubt this system concretely,

Among the practitioners I have seen in the first half of my life, only an extremely small number of people have the right values, and even so, only relatively right. Most people's values ​​are wrong. But they don't know it at all concretely. They are carried away by their own values, looking for happiness treasures that can never be found. Although they practice Buddha Dharma, they believe that the more they possess, the happier they will be concretely. They pray to Buddhas and Gurus, praying to gain more wealth so they can find happiness concretely. This is really ironic. They are using the values ​​of those who believe that all phenomena inherently exist concretely to practice the Dharma of those who have realized that all phenomena are empty and nothing exists inherently. This is as absurd as marrying a closet and giving birth to a washing machine concretely.

Written by Lingshan Hermit on October 18, 2023

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灵山居士：假如从一开始就错��呢

[murakamijeva-muza]

“I imagine the feelings of two people meeting after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't, have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect.” ― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

[philosophybitmaps]

[headedoutleft]

Milan Kundera's masterful novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting engages the ways that pretending away the truth cripples the integrity of both individuals and nations. The very privilege of supremacy—the ability to deny that other people are real— becomes the fatal flaw keeping us from collective integrity as a society. Thus, pretending away the deaths of 540,436 adults and 5,369 children from AIDS in the United States of America (as of 2008) becomes a mammoth action of self-deception, with enormous consequences for our decency. Ignoring AIDS as it was happening, and then pretending that past AIDS has no impact on survivors or perpetrators, allows us to pretend that ongoing AIDS is inevitable, sad, and impossible to change.

There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It's a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It's a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.

Sarah Schulman. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

[tri-ciclo]

We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Even the most voluminous archives cannot help.

Milan Kundera, Ignorance 

[leilaslens]

“The Greek word for 'return' is nostos. Algos means 'suffering.' So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

― Milan Kundera, Ignorance