MILAN KUNDERA
Murder simply
hastens a bit what God will eventually see to on His own. God, it may be assumed,
took murder into account; . . .
─ The Unbearable Lightness of Being
But, he said to himself, whether they knew
or didn’t know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is
innocent because he didn’t know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all
responsibility merely because he is a fool?
Let us concede that a Czech public
prosecutor in the early fifties who called for the death of an innocent man was
deceived by the Russian secret police and the government of his own country.
But now that we all know the accusations to have been absurd and the execution
to have been innocent, how can that selfsame public prosecutor defend his
purity of heart by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, My conscience
is clear! I didn’t know! I was a believer! Isn’t his “I didn’t know! I was a
believer!” at the very root of his irreparable guilt?
It was in this connection that Tomas
recalled the tale of Oedipus: Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own
mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did not feel innocent.
Unable to stand the sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by “not knowing,”
he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.
─ The Unbearable Lightness of Being
His act of murder was a strange one:
murder without a motive. Nothing was to be gained by it. Then what sense did it
make? Clearly, its only sense was to make him see that he was a murderer.
Murder as experiment, as an act of
self-revelation, this was a familiar story: the story of Raskolnikov. He
murdered in order to answer for himself the question:
Does man have the right to kill an inferior human being, and would he be strong
enough to bear the consequences? The murder was a question posed to his own
self.
─ The Farewell Party
. . . There
was one thing I had learned after a year in prison: A prisoner needs at least
his one certainty ─ that he is master of his own death, capable of choosing its
time and manner. When you have that certainty, you can stand almost anything.
You always know it is in your power to escape life anytime you choose.
─ The Farewell Party
. . . I’ll
tell you the saddest discovery of my life: The victims are no better than their
oppressors. I can easily imagine the roles reversed. You can call it a kind of
alibi-ism, an attempt to evade responsibility and to blame everything on the
Creator Who made man the way he is. And maybe it’s good that you see things
that way. Because to come to the conclusion that there is no difference between
the guilty and their victims is to reach a state where you abandon all hope. And that, my dear, is a definition of hell.”
─ The Farewell Party
. . . “Are you
one of those people who call abortion ‘murder’?”
Bartleff kept a lengthy silence. At last
he emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed and neatly combed.
“’Murder’ is a word that smells too much
of the hangman’s noose”, he said. I am concerned about something else. You
know, I believe that life is to be accepted totally and completely. That’s the
very first commandment which has precedence over the other ten. Everything that
is about to happen today is in the hands of God, and we know nothing of
tomorrow. What I am trying to say is that total acceptance of life means
acceptance of the unforeseen. And a child is the essence of the unforeseen, it
is the unforeseen itself. You have no idea what the child will grow into, what
it will mean for you, and that’s why you have to welcome it. Otherwise you’re
only half alive, you’re living like a poor swimmer paddling in the shallows
near the shore, while the sea really begins where the water is deep.”
─ The Farewell Party
There isn’t a
person on this planet who is not capable of sending a fellow human being to
death without any great pangs of conscience. At least I have never found anyone
like that. If humanity ever changes in that regard, it will lose one of its
most basic characteristics. Those will no longer be human beings, but creatures
of some other type.
─ The Farewell Party
By turning all
of humanity into murderers, your own murders cease to be crimes and become an
essential characteristic of the human race!
─ The Farewell Party
He had finally
come around to the position of his more cautious friends. True, the
constitution guaranteed freedom of speech; but the law punished any act that
could be construed as undermining the state. Who could tell when the state
would start screaming that this or that word was undermining it? He decided
he’d better put the incriminating papers in a safe place after all.
─ The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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