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3.96 AVERAGE
3.96 AVERAGE
It took me 3 weeks to read 39 pages in this book. Life is too short... I give up.
amazing metaphors
visual language
great writing style
love it
visual language
great writing style
love it
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
slow-paced
I got 40 pages in and had to stop. This book is terrible! It bounces all over the place, it waxes philosophical in a way that seem irrelevant to the book and totally pointless in general. The essence seems to be about a guy who can't stop sleeping with women and cheating on his wife. How profound. I am not impressed.
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
N/A
3.5 stars. I liked this a lot, and it had a lot of beautiful things to say about relationships and the world - but it still fell a bit short for me.
•”The student mistress was much younger than Sabina, and the musical composition of her life had scarcely been outlined; she was grateful to Franz for the motifs he gave her to insert.”
•”The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love.
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.”
•”The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures.
Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.
The reason we take that right for granted is that we stand at the top of the hierarchy.”
•”How could he have known? How could he have gauged it? Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.”
•”He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library, it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends. He loved to dance and regretted that Sabina did not share his passion.”
•”For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntary make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.”
•”That of course was an external “Es muss sein!” reserved for him by social convention, whereas the “Es muss sein!” of his love for medicine was internal. So much the worse for him. Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement of revolt”.
•”…is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and to gain thereby a slower death?”
“Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience. History is as light as individual human life, Unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”
•”The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love.
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.”
•”The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures.
Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.
The reason we take that right for granted is that we stand at the top of the hierarchy.”
•”How could he have known? How could he have gauged it? Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.”
•”He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library, it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends. He loved to dance and regretted that Sabina did not share his passion.”
•”For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntary make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.”
•”That of course was an external “Es muss sein!” reserved for him by social convention, whereas the “Es muss sein!” of his love for medicine was internal. So much the worse for him. Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement of revolt”.
•”…is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and to gain thereby a slower death?”
“Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience. History is as light as individual human life, Unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”
You know you're in for a ride one way or another when a book mentions Nietzsche in its first sentence. Through the backdrop of several couples with lots of affairs in a Communist occupied Czechia the book runs a large gamut of different philosophical waxings. Obviously, the book's title of the "lightness of being" of sort of living life carefree and how that often clashes with "heaviness" of those who choose (or are ingrained) to be weighted by morals or ideals or attachments or what not. But that central theme shows many facets and goes on many tangents: meaning of life, romance, familial relations, relation of animals to humans, hierarchy in society, profession, religion, Communism, power structures, communication, perspectives, you name it.
I waffled on giving this book 3 or 4 stars (and certainly would have given it 3.5 if Goodreads had that option), because while all the basic plot of the book is more to facilitate the philosophical points, the integration of the two often causes the basic plot to veer off in weird directions or stop in a scene abruptly to make way for the philosophical lecture. But in the end, I had to give it more than 3 stars because the book successfully conveyed its profoundness and made me think of a lot of different things from different angles, or at least help coalesce ideas that many of us probably have a sense of subconsciously but need something like this book to form the ideas into concrete thoughts.
I see that Goodreads is saying many who read this also read The Stranger. From what I remember of The Stranger they both have a similar feel to them. But I thought this one was less absurd than The Stranger, the coverage of philosophical ideas was greater, and the reading of it flowed better. They are different enough that there is definitely room for both though.
I waffled on giving this book 3 or 4 stars (and certainly would have given it 3.5 if Goodreads had that option), because while all the basic plot of the book is more to facilitate the philosophical points, the integration of the two often causes the basic plot to veer off in weird directions or stop in a scene abruptly to make way for the philosophical lecture. But in the end, I had to give it more than 3 stars because the book successfully conveyed its profoundness and made me think of a lot of different things from different angles, or at least help coalesce ideas that many of us probably have a sense of subconsciously but need something like this book to form the ideas into concrete thoughts.
I see that Goodreads is saying many who read this also read The Stranger. From what I remember of The Stranger they both have a similar feel to them. But I thought this one was less absurd than The Stranger, the coverage of philosophical ideas was greater, and the reading of it flowed better. They are different enough that there is definitely room for both though.