Aporia. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker.

February 14th, 2012

I think.” Nietzsche cast doubt on this assertion dictated by a grammatical convention that every verb must have a subject. Actually, said he, “a thought comes when ‘it’ wants to, and not when ‘I’ want it to; so that it is falsifying the fact to say that the subject ‘I’ is necessary to the verb ‘think.’” A thought, comes to the philosopher “from outside, from above or below, like events or thunderbolts heading for him.” It comes in a rush. For Nietzsche loves “a bold and exuberant intellectuality that runs presto,” and he makes fun of the savants for whom thought seems “a slow, halting activity, something like drudgery, often enough worth the sweat of the hero-savants, but nothing like that light, divine thing that is such close kin to dance and to high-spirited gaiety.” Elsewhere Nietzsche writes that the; philosopher “must not, through some false arrangement of deduction and dialectic, falsify the things and the ideas he arrived at by another route…. We should neither conceal nor corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us. The most profound and inexhaustible books will surely always have something of the aphoristic, abrupt quality of Pascal’s ‘Pensées.’”

We should not “corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us”: I find this injunction remarkable; and I notice that, beginning with ‘The Dawn,’ all the chapters in all his books are written in a single paragraph: this is so that a thought should be uttered in one single breath; so that it should be caught the way it appeared as it sped toward the philosopher, swift and dancing.

Milan Kundera in Testaments Betrayed, discussing the meaning of the various prose styles developed by Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and how technical details like paragraph structure and the use of semicolons express deeper elements of an author’s thought and purpose.

Good writing is deliberated style as much as resonant content; there should be nothing automatic, nothing inherited, nothing thoughtless. Punctuation and typeface are not incidental; indentation- and sentence-length and paragraph rhythms all matter, and all ought to be the purposive stylistic expression of authorial intent.

For whatever reason, many seem to consider such things beyond the boundaries of artistic creativity in prose, as though we are obliged to adopt the happenstance syntax of our languages. We are not, but style is not merely a matter of some radical pose, refusing to use commas or arbitrarily violating grammatical rules in a demonstrative way. Rebellion is a crutch in art.

Good prose style is simpler and harder. We must be ruthless in interrogating everything about our writing: the plain honesty of its intentions, the truth of its substance, the value of the ideas it expresses, the novelty (or at least utility) of its existence, and all its tiniest details, all its small conformities to and violations of the rules of the language, all its periods and ellipses and dashes, all the choices we make about quotation marks and italicization, all the elements few readers consciously notice but all readers register.

January 12th, 2012

Zoom

Shirtless men converse on a stationary train, seen from ours as we passed through a station in southern China late at night. Why did I want so much to be on their train, as I want to be inside every living room or kitchen I spy through windows on city-walks in the evening? Milan Kundera in Testaments Betrayed on Kafka’s use of windows in The Trial:

[Kafka] created the extremely poetic image of an extremely nonpoetic world. By “extremely nonpoetic world” I mean: a world where there is no longer a place for individual freedom, for the uniqueness of the individual, where man is only the instrument of inhuman forces: of bureaucracy, technology, history. By “extremely poetic image” I mean: without changing its essence and its nonpoetic nature, Kafka has transformed, reshaped that world by his immense poetic imagination.

K. is completely absorbed by the predicament of this trial that has been imposed upon him; he hasn’t a moment to think about anything else. And yet, even in this no-way-out predicament, there are windows that open suddenly, for a brief instant. He cannot escape through these windows; they edge open and then shut instantly; but for a flash at least, he can see the poetry of the world outside, the poetry that, despite everything, exists as an ever-present possibility and sends a small silvery glint into his life as a hunted man.

Some such brief openings are K.’s glances, for instance: he reaches the suburban street where he has been called for his first interrogation. A moment before, he was still running to get there on time. Now he stops. Standing in the street, he forgets the trial for a few seconds and looks around: “Most of the windows were occupied, men in shirtsleeves were leaning there smoking or holding children carefully and tenderly on the windowsills. Other windows were piled high with bedding, above which the disheveled head of a woman would appear for a moment.” Then he enters the courtyard: “Near him, a barefooted man was sitting on a crate reading a newspaper. Two boys were see-sawing on a handcart. A frail young girl was standing at a pump in her nightdress and gazing at K. while she filled her jug with water.”

These sentences remind me of Flaubert’s descriptions: concice; visually rich; a sense of detail, none of which is clichéd. That power of description makes clear how thirsty K. is for reality, how avidly he drinks up the world that, just a moment earlier, was eclipsed by the trial. Alas, the pause is short; the next instant, K. no longer has eyes for the frail young girl…

As much as his sourceless, automatic shame and his thirst for reality, it is K.’s inability to keep such windows open that makes him a resonant, contemporary archetype; that Kafka writes “…K. no longer has eyes for the frail young girl” means that the closing of this window is at least in part a matter of agency, of will strangely and mysteriously subverted by inhuman forces, just as is the trial itself. K. wishes but does not wish to escape, fears and pursues and indeed forces his own destruction, and seems to know but not know that reality exists all around him, awaits him, can save him. He flees it.

K. behaves as a man on a train who has only a moment’s attention to spare for the landscape he passes, the lives he can see through the windows, as do we all; but there is no train; there is not even a path; we are obliged to attend only to what we will ourselves to attend to; yet despite knowing that the reality we seek is so near at hand, despite thirsting for this reality —apart from the pseudoreality of offices, online networks, the news— we turn back to our phones, drop our faces and lower our eyes to them, ignore even the windows which themselves only provide hints of what we crave.

December 19th, 2011

This is the problem: Many years ago I sat one day, in a sad enough mood, on the slopes of the Laurenziberg. I went over the wishes that I wanted to realize in life. I found that the most important or the most delightful was the wish to attain a view of life (and—this was necessarily bound up with it—to convince others of it in writing) in which life, while still retaining its natural full-bodied rise and fall, would simultaneously be recognized no less clearly as a nothing, a dream, a dim hovering. A beautiful wish, perhaps, if I had wished it rightly. Considered as a wish, somewhat as if one were to hammer together a table with painful and methodical technical efficiency, and simultaneously do nothing at all, and not in such a way that people could say: “Hammering a table together is nothing to him,” but rather: “Hammering a table together is really hammering a table together to him, but at the same time it is nothing,” whereby certainly the hammering would have become still bolder, still surer, still more real, and, if you will, still more senseless.

Franz Kafka in his diary, 1920, from Cosmopsis.

November 2nd, 2011

The longer one hesitates before the door, the more estranged one becomes. What would happen if someone were to open the door now and ask me a question? Would not I myself then behave like one who wants to keep his secret?

Franz Kafka, Homecoming.

June 8th, 2011

I walked past the brothel as though it were the house of a beloved.

Franz Kafka, in an entry in his diary in 1910.

Is it an atavism that desire can metamorphose —in the right circumstances, in conditions either desperately arid or instead lush with pressures which we deeply fear— into meaning, or something like it? In such states, do we merely experience the original, baser form of urges otherwise disguised by baroque lyricism, cultural traditions, rationalizations? Or is this a kind of alternative, pathological desire: longing for flight transfigured into frenzied need, then confused with love?

Or does Kafka simply mean that there is little difference between these gradations of lust and love? We may consider love beautiful, meaningful, poetic, but can we imagine the sublimity or beauty present in wanting, in needing, in desire as such?

In any event: this is a state I associate with vast cities at night, with alcohol, with travel, with solitude amidst crowds, emptiness within density; the lonely drunk, envious, angry, sad, pleading, and desperate, desirous of the world as though he loves it when, in fact, he is capable only of sentimental bargains, barters, exchanges, all to be disregarded at daybreak.

June 3rd, 2011

Zoom

Tully Mills’ grape snapping turtle, inspired by Natasha, made my year; I’ll admit that the man is a genius, even if it feels some egomaniacal to praise another Mills. What can I say? It’s a name too odd not to beneficially warp whomever it wraps; if you want your child to believe s/he’s an adult -a kind of precocity, a precursor to pretension- bestow a name which will oblige him or her to constantly correct mispronouncing parents and teachers. I am not Miles.

Another radical turtle: Brer Terrapin, by Barry Moser (posted by Joel Chandler Harris and brought to my attention via Rachel Maddux):

Brer is obviously more civilized than the grape snapping turtle, but one can imagine him looking on his primitive relation with something other than pure pity, as was the case with Kafka’s mysteriously civilized ape:

When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. But I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it.

I like turtles.

April 21st, 2011

Actually, Karl had no feelings for the girl. In the crush of an ever-receding past, she was sitting in the kitchen, with one elbow propped on the kitchen dresser. She would look at him when he went into the kitchen for a glass of water for his father, or to do an errand for his mother. Sometimes, she would be sitting in her strange position by the dresser, writing a letter, and drawing inspiration from Karl’s face. Sometimes she would be covering her eyes with her hand, then it was impossible to speak to her. Sometimes she would be kneeling in her little room off the kitchen, praying to a wooden cross, and Karl would shyly watch her through the open door as he passed. Sometimes she would be rushing about the kitchen, and spin round, laughing like a witch whenever Karl got in her way. Sometimes she would shut the kitchen door when Karl came in, and hold the doorknob in her hand until he asked her to let him out. Sometimes she would bring him things he hadn’t asked for, and silently press them into his hands. Once, though, she said ‘Karl!’ and led him -still astonished at the unexpected address- sighing and grimacing into her little room, and bolted it. Then she almost throttled him in an embrace, and, while asking him to undress her she actually undressed him, and laid him in her bed, as though she wanted to keep him all to herself from now on, and stroke him and look after him until the end of the world. ‘Karl, oh my Karl!’ she said as if she could see him and wanted to confirm her possession of him, while he could see nothing at all and felt uncomfortable amid all the warm bedding that she had apparently piled on especially for his sake. Then she lay down beside him, and asked to hear some secret or other, but he was unable to tell her any, then she was angry with him or pretended to be angry, he wasn’t sure which, and she shook him, listened to his heartbeat, offered him her chest so that he could listen to hers the same way, but Karl couldn’t bring himself to do that, and she pressed her naked belly against his, reached her hand down and groped between his legs in so disgusting a manner that Karl’s head and neck came thrashing out from among the pillows, pushed her belly against his several times -he felt she was a part of himself and that may be why he was overcome by a terrible need.

Franz Kafka, Amerika. Read with full imaginative attention, this passage is heartbreaking, enthralling, hilarious, pictorial, experiential, perfectly real; the description of the relations and congress of this sweet, entrancing, lustful servant girl and the helpless, dim protagonist of the novel, which leads to her undiscussed pregnancy and his exile from Europe, has an almost impossible emotional density.

April 16th, 2011

But sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle — the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, they could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their faces looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.

David Foster Wallace in The Pale King, which I’ve not read; this is from the “Good People” excerpt and was quoted by The Heavily Abridged Life & Times. The final line is quite good, better than many pyrotechnical turns of Wallace’s invention that will endure and define his style: the combination of vernacular rhythms with formal or even pedantic diction, for example, or the peppering of “which” into sentences, or the whole “brief interpolation” tic.

I believe Wallace’s fixation on the psychological spaces within lives of tedium, on the possibilities of beauty, freedom, heroism within the most ordinary lives imaginable, places him in the same literary milieu as Robert Musil, who also displayed ludicrous, encyclopedic polymathy in his pursuit of lost individual worlds: they were writers of the gaps, looking for agency and selfhood in the spaces left by triumphantly expansive bureaucracies of culture, politics, sciences, economics.

In his excellent Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera argues that the European novel (which includes most of the American tradition) has taken one approach to this task, while outside of Europe another has been pursued:

The tendency of the novel in the last stages of its modernism: in Europe, the ordinary pursued to its utomost; sophisticated analysis of gray on gray; outside Europe: accumulation of the most extraordinary coincidences; colors on colors. The dangers: in Europe, tedium of gray; outside Europe, monotony of the picturesque.

In many of his stories, Wallace seems determined to use elements of the magical realist traditions to leaven, as it were, the “tedium of gray”; in “Mister Squishy”, from Oblivion, for example, unresolved, bizarre, side-stories contrast with a study of gray on gray, and the people trapped within all those layers of gray, between lifeless layers of accumulated bureaucratic detritus, the sediment of dead sentiments, the quantification of all desire and fear, par excellence.

Aside from literally magical or highly dramatic plots, Wallace sometimes relies on metaphorical flights to give affective depth to the crises of inaction, stagnation, and boredom which are hard to capture in their awesome profundity given their very nature: too dull to make meaningful, they remain the most meaningful themes of our lives.

The metaphor above is not unlike one Kafka might have used, but Kafka would have been as likely to write a parable-like short piece about the armies themselves as to place them within a larger narrative.

In any event, it is above all true: so often in your life, you are thusly torn, and you feel the heated shame of knowing that you’re “Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.” There is a dramatic range of feelings, fears, possibilities within the depreciated spaces left to the individual, though one must assume that even they will soon be conquered, taken over by expanding technologies and the markets they make of our private worlds.

February 19th, 2011

Beauty plus pity —that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.

Vladimir Nabokov, in his lecture on “The Metamorphosis.” Having dispatched with the question of art’s definition, he addresses how we compose reality. Describing a forested landscape and different sorts of men walking across it, sensing it through their different perceptual customs and associations, he says that

…we can take these [disparately perceived] individual worlds, mix them thoroughly together, scoop up a drop of that mixture, and call it objective reality. We may taste in it a particle of madness if a lunatic passed through that locality, or a particle of complete and beautiful nonsense if a man has been looking at [this] lovely field and imagining upon it a factory producing buttons or bombs; but on the whole these mad particles would be diluted in the drop of objective reality we hold up to the light in our test tube. Moreover, this objective reality will contain something that transcends optical illusions and laboratory tests. It will have elements of poetry, of lofty emotion, of energy and endeavor (and even here the button king may find his rightful place) —and the craving for a thick steak at the recommended roadside eating place. So when we say reality we are really thinking of all this —in one drop— an average sample of a mixture of a million individual realities.

He the calls this reality “human reality.” So semantically-precise a thinker as Nabokov would not accidentally equate objective reality and human reality; we are already meant to consider the possibility that they are the same. Are they? Is there no truth without sentences, without creaturely perceptions?

Perhaps he means only that, for an artist, what is human is objective; I would agree, and add that it is for this reason that art which satirizes human realities by comparing them to putatively objective realities —usually theoretical in nature, usually political today, once commonly religious, generally faddish in a broad historical sense— is bad art. At the absolute core of good art must be a compassionate comprehension of the primacy of human realities, their totality, whether they belong to an interloping lunatic in the landscape or to The Button King.

It also seems to me that if there are other realities, it is not the essential work of an artist to explore them, although they can of course be used as context or catalyst for the human realities unfolding amidst them. Moreover, those concerned chiefly with any reality beyond human reality —that is, scientists, certain sorts of religious believers, and the archly theoretical— ought to forgive artists for their preoccupation with the latter. There is quite enough attention paid, I think, to worlds larger, more powerful, indifferent to and far beyond ours; that some field of endeavor should attend to human reality is perfectly justifiable.

March 25th, 2010

And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.

Nick noted this excellent line from Grizzly Man in response to Distorte’s posted clip of Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. As surely as we are prone to anthropomorphize nature or perceive -and thereby construct- within it ethical or merciful qualities, we will at times see it as a terrible blankness: without human time, without memory, without narrative meaning, a nightmare void.

I am reminded, tangentially, of the feelings the civilized ape in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” has about his captive, wild chimpanzee consort: “I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it.”

February 6th, 2010

Betraying Your Favorite Author

The Bronze Medal quotes William Deresiewicz, who in the New Republic criticizes the exploitative packaging and publishing of Nabokov’s authorial detritus, which

“…breaks new ground in editorial chutzpah, inviting us to play a kind of Nabokov: Rock Band—the novel as theme park. One can only imagine what dear old dad—the ultimate artistic control freak, not to mention one of the all-time snobs—would have thought of the idea of letting his readers re-arrange his scraps and chapters at will… Nabokov… was never anything other than a classicist in the perfection of finish that he gave to his work. Pale Fire may yoke together a foreward, a poem, a commentary, and an index, all warring like the principalities of a madman’s soul, but the terms of their struggle are worked out to the last comma. The man built racing machines. To think that he would hand us a bucket of parts—and even more, leave us to fumble around with their order, the implication of Dmitri’s invitation to re-arrangement (deconstruct this book!)—is to commit an outrage against the spirit of his art.”

Deresiewicz’s use of the term “outrage” is interesting, and will be familiar to readers of Milan Kundera’s many polemics against the posthumous abuse of authors. In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera tells several stories of artists whose deaths occasioned the most egregious betrayals, like Kafka’s best friend Max Brod disobeying Kafka’s clear instructions to destroy certain manuscripts, publishing them instead. Without this betrayal, the world wouldn’t know Kafka, a fact which in no way reduces the personal disloyalty of Brod. Or does it?

I thought, too, of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s misrepresentation and exploitation of her brother after he lapsed into dementia and died, thanks to which he is to this day associated with Nazism and other detestable causes which his work and writings clearly repudiate.

None are more vulnerable, of course, than the dead: their wishes are ours to respect or reject, and because they cannot control even their most intimate possessions we are free to -and in fact academically demand to- rifle through their personal lives, their discarded scraps, their diaries, which we publish and dissect: an autopsy of their minds and hearts and choices. Kundera is right, in some respects, to deplore this cavalier contempt for the dead and their wishes.

Of course, it persists: even now we await the publishing of whatever David Foster Wallace, JD Salinger, Nabokov, and others left behind. We are eager to violate their privacy, anxious to read the biographies that peek into those spaces they kept from us. What excuses this? If they didn’t share something in their lives -if they chose not to, didn’t want to- for what reason do we consider it tolerable to ferret it out when they can no longer protect it?

We believe authors and artists -and their lives- have something to tell us of such value, of such import, that their wishes to protect certain things from scrutiny are outweighed by our right to know.
We do not trust their capacities for self-evaluation: Kafka was wrong to want his stories burned!
We feel that the dead, in not existing, have no claim to our deference, loyalty, respect.

These seem questionable to me. If (1) is the case, we must accept that the right to privacy is highly contingent and that the sagacity of our favorite artists was limited: they don’t know the value of their scraps, works, lives, but we do. To me, (2) seems most plausible, but often their private lives and editorial decisions reflect decades of judgement on their part: if we question those decisions, we question their capacity for understanding in general and assert that it is our matter to deliberate, not theirs. And (3) is obviously not broadly believed: what of memorials, monuments, the tributes to the dead, or the fealty towards and affection for one’s own relatives?

Insatiable curiosity, a virtue and vice, a condition of human achievement and the cause of much of our cultural squalor, seems most responsible. This is why Kundera tells the story of his Icelandic friend, for whom “ friendship… is standing guard at the door behind which your friend keeps his private life hidden; it is being the person who never opens that door; who allows no one else to open it.”

Most of us were not friends with Salinger or Wallace, yet in our treacly pronouncements of fondness for them we approach a level of attachment that seems at odds with the fact that most of us will happily buy what they didn’t want to publish and pry into what they wanted kept secret.

November 25th, 2009

Simen, of the Daily Meh, is one of my favorites; he posted the above photograph and detail, and wrote what follows about it (I highly recommend his review of Crewdson).

Speaking of Kafka, he wrote a cryptic little short story called The Cares of a Family Man (Die Sorge des Hausvaters). It’s really short; you can read it here.

The picture above is Odradek, Táboritská 8, Prague, 18 July 1994, by Jeff Wall. Wall is known for his large-scale staged photographs, like Gregory Crewdson, though Wall has been doing it for longer. Some of Wall’s pictures are recreations of works by others. In my review of Crewdson’s Beneath the Roses, I included one of Wall’s pictures called A Sudden Gust of Wind, after a print by Hokusai.

Anyway, the amount of time and resources that goes into creating each of these pictures is stunning. Yet when you look at the picture, you may very well miss the little detail in the middle, shown above. That is the point. Huge resources were spent creating the picture; the point is Odradek, whom you might not notice at a glance.

I was reminded of Odradek recently when I came across an excellent Tumblr-user who bears the creature’s name. As I mentioned to her, Odradek was important to a course I took on Kafka which concerned not only his works but also the often-absurd ideas of “Kafkology,” the scholarship that surrounds them.

Kafkology was memorably defined by Kundera in a tautology: “Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.” By this he meant that the hysterical, bombastic, indefensible ideas of scholars who misunderstood everything about Kafka -on from his executor Max Brod, who thought that his works depicted the horrible torments of hell which meet those who sin!- were never about Kafka at all. Rather, they were about using his powerful, seemingly encoded stories to support whatever the pet interests of said scholars happened to be.

My professor, Franz Kempf, shared with us the views of one addled academic who claimed that “Odradek,” the word, in some language or another, sounded like “Oh, there is dirt there,” which he further took to be a reference to the anus. Thus, the academic asserted in his delightfully serious essay, “The Cares of Family Man” concerns homosexuality and Kafka’s ambivalence about it, his simultaneous desire and discomfort, bourgeois repression of the body, etc. etc. ad absurdum.

I will concede to Simen that there are problems with assessing the meaning of dreams, and Kafka’s sometimes dream-like stories share that quality: anyone can detect in them indictments of whatever they hate, celebration of what they like, images of whatever they can use to build their thick, dry essays and deep, dull monographs.

November 24th, 2009

But then? No then.

Franz Kafka in “Description of a Struggle,” quoted by Zadie Smith in an essay forwarded to me by Meaghano; more on the essay itself later.

September 21st, 2009

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Franz Kafka, “Aphorism 52.” Is this because the world will win, or because the world is right, especially about you?

September 18th, 2009

BMKK, whose posts I love, shared Leoš Janáček’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, IV. Adagio, alone with a mysterious epigraph of sorts:

“—The sky is a roof, with windows in it for rain to fall through. People live up there, you see. And if you climb up high enough you can visit them.”—WG

Nearly as much as did Kafka’s, Janáček’s reputation benefited from the intervention of Max Brod, whose relationships with the great Czech figures demonstrates that people who do not understand art can nevertheless love it -consolation for me!- and even help it. Many of Janáček’s difficulties derived from his rejection by Czech musical culture, particularly the Communist devotee of Smetana Zdeněk Nejedlý (never sufficiently punished for his pettiness, viciousness, or conflation of the aesthetic, political, and personal, in my view).

Janáček and his wife Zdenka.

Janáček’s marriage was not a successful one: he fell in love with other women and refused even moderate discretion, provoking his wife to a suicide attempt and an eventual loveless cohabitation as he pursued his affairs and his work.

His music is fascinating and relentlessly inventive; he seems to have been compulsively original, restlessly exploratory, and as such he anticipates many better-known composers of later years. Two of his great popularizers aside from Brod -Sir Charles Mackerras and Milan Kundera, in whose Testaments Betrayed I first read of Janáček- speak of his work as though it approached the prophetic, particularly his interest in psychological realism in operatic melody. Mackerras has said that he was “the first minimalist composer.”

An unrequited object of affection, Kamila Stösslová.

Kundera concludes his brief biographical sketch of Janáček by describing his happier late years, when he was finally afforded international success and no longer required to accept meddlesome and moronic changes to his work. He also finds himself (again) in love with a young woman, Kamila Stösslová. On a trip with her, Kundera says, the 74-year-old plays light-heartedly with her son, catches a cold which develops into pneumonia, and dies in the midst of happiness. I cannot say how much of the anecdote is invented, but it expresses the arc of his life well even if it is apocryphal.

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