Free Slowness by Milan Kundera

imagine, he was speaking Czech! Completely demented things: ‘Mickiewicz is not Czech! Mickiewicz is Polish!’ Then he came a few steps from me, threatening, and that’s when you woke me up.”
    “Forgive me,” I say, “you’re the victim of my crazy imagination.”
    “How do you mean?”
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    huge concert where they present all of Beethoven’s one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each. If the same concert were given again in ten years, only the first note of each piece would be played, thus one hundred thirty-eight notes for the whole concert, presented as one continuous melody. And in twenty years, the whole of Beethoven’s music would be summed up in a single very long buzzing tone, like the endless sound he heard the first day of his deafness.
    The Czech scientist is plunged in melancholy, and as a sort of consolation, the idea occurs to him that from the period of his heroic labor in construction, which everyone wants to forget, he still retains a material and palpable souvenir: an excellent physique. A discreet smile of satisfaction plays over his face, for he is certain that among the people here, no one has muscles like his.
    Yes, believe it or not, this seemingly laughable idea really does him good. He throws off his jacket and stretches out flat on his stomach on the floor. Then he raises himself on his arms. He repeats this movement twenty-six times, and he is proud of himself. He remembers when he and
    At just about the same time, the Czech scientist has returned to his room, dejected, his soul bruised. His ears are still filled with the laughter that burst forth after Berck’s sarcasms. And he is still taken aback: can people really move so easily from veneration to contempt?
    And indeed, I wondered, what did become of the kiss that the Sublime Planetary Historic News Event had planted on his brow?
    This is where the courtiers of the News Event make their mistake. They do not know that the situations history stages are floodlit only for the first few minutes. No event remains news over its whole duration, merely for a quite brief span of time, at the very beginning. The dying children of Somalia whom millions of spectators used to watch avidly, aren’t they dying anymore? What has become of them? Have they grown fatter or thinner? Does Somalia still exist? And in fact did it ever exist? Could it be only the name of a mirage?
    The way contemporary history is told is like a
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    his mates would go swimming after work in a little pond behind the construction site. To tell the truth, he was a hundred times happier then than he is today in this chateau. The workmen used to call him Einstein, and they were fond of him.
    And the idea occurs to him, a frivolous idea (he recognizes the frivolity and is even pleased by it), to go for a swim in the fine hotel pool. With a joyous and fully conscious vanity, he means to show off his body to the feeble intellectuals of this sophisticated, overcultivated, and ultimately perfidious country. Fortunately, he has brought his bathing trunks along from Prague (he takes them with him everywhere); he puts them on and looks at himself, half naked, in the mirror. He flexes his arms, and his biceps swell magnificently. “If anyone tried to deny my past, here are my muscles, irrefutable proof!” He imagines his body parading around the pool, showing the French that there exists one utterly fundamental value, bodily perfection, the perfection he personally can boast and that none of them has any idea of. Then he decides it’s a little unseemly to walk nearly naked through the hotel corridors, and he pulls on an undershirt. Now for the feet.
    Leaving them bare seems to him as inappropriate as putting on shoes; so he decides to wear only socks. Thus clothed, he looks one more time in the mirror. Again his melancholy is joined by pride, and again he feels sure of himself.
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    Ass hole. It could be said