Something from a book

Well well, since I'm not creating fast enough, let's talk about some of the things that are slowing me down -

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

I've been trying to read this book since university and somehow I carried it around and never got to start reading it. The book is old and yellow now from sitting around the shelves of different places and carried in different bags in time.

Now 1/3 through the book I think I have got to two sections that defines the two key elements of the novel.

Forgetting:
Let's start with this...
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
But wait, it's not just about humanity and politics, let's go down to the personal level...
"The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past."
Agree or disagree?

Laughing:
"Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things, make us laugh. In origin," (per Kundera) "laughter is thus of the devil's domanin. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extend also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness)."

Hold on, there are more than that...

"wherease the devil's laughter denoted the absurdity of things, the angel on the contrary meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good, and meaningful everything here below was. Thus the angel and the devil faced each other and, mouths wide open, emitted nearly the same sounds, but each one's noise expressed the absolute opposite of other's...nowadays we don't even realize that the same external display serves two absolutely opposed internal attitudes. There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other."

Well, this is dedicated to the evil comedy lovers *grin*


TGIF. So not in the mood of working.