February 12, 2008

  • Immortality - Milan Kundera

    Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about your face and imagine it as an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then, when you reached forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your life. Imagine your fright. You'd see the face of a stranger. And you'd know quite clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you.

    ...We got our names, too, merely by accident. We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor aquired it.

    We don't understand our name at all,

    we don't know it's history, and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.

    A face is like a name. It must have happened sometime toward the end of my childhood: I kept looking in the mirror for such a long time that I finally believed that was I was seeing was myself. My recollection of this period is very vague, but I know that the discovery of the self must have been intoxicating. Yet there comes a time when you stand in front of a mirror and ask yourself: This is myself? And why? Why did I want to identify with this? What do I care about this face? And at that moment everything starts to crumble.