2025 Readings 17

 "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

This coming Monday I'm giving a Blue Stool talk on the Mythology of American Exceptionalism. The Blue Stools, long hosted by my friend Chuck, are designed to be short public lectures, which are given during the breaks in between classes, hence they're all around twelve minutes long, presented, sadly, in a mad rush. Mainly they're designed to throw out an idea, and in the process inspire our students to keep learning, and to understand that learning is not something that simply begins and ends in the classroom itself. I haven't given one for years. When I came back from my year in the UAE I gave one related to the experience and the false perceptions that people on the this side of the Atlantic had about the Middle East. Truthfully, however, I'm not certain what I actually spoke on, partially because it wasn't filmed (I asked them not to do so because I was going to talk about the university where I taught and individuals there, who, even if I didn't mention their names, it would have been easy to figure out who they were; I wasn't saying anything terrible, but what might be constituted in the UAE as terrible is not necessarily what I would have thought constituted terrible) and also because I didn't have any notes (another one of my typical shortcomings as a speaker). They are going to film this one, but my passive-aggressive scheme to make sure that the talk never sees the light of day is to say fuck at least three times, evenly spaced throughout the talk.

This odd introduction relates to the seventeenth book I read this year: Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In between the impending talk - and also the continued nightmare of the Trump junta - I naturally found my way back to Kundera's work. This is a book that I've read several times, the first being around thirty-five years ago, when folks were still routinely reading this novel as well as The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Sadly, this doesn't seem to be the case anymore, and it's rare that you see his novels on the shelf. I still remember reading, and then writing down, his definition of the Czech word litost, "a state of torment created by the sudden light of one's own misery." Although, truthfully, that might have just been part of an exoticizing of my own suffering - or maybe I was just listening to too many Smiths albums. Fernando Pessoa said that his greatest regret was never being able to read Dickens's The Pickwick Papers again for the first time. Maybe one of my greatest regrets is not being able to read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting again for the first time. This is true not simply because it would mean that I was a younger man, but rather that that younger man was more intellectually hungry and also that my mind, my intellectual/cultural soil, was more ripe for planting (less over-planted). I still enjoyed the novel, although not as much as when I was younger, but, again, I'm not in the place to be as profoundly moved as I was all those decades ago. Now I mainly felt sad, which I suspect is a product of living in a country in the process of being invaded, not a Czechoslovakia invaded by the Soviets, but an invasion still the same.