John's Site

As a young person one sees time as a road leading ever forward to new horizons. Astrology, however, as a metaphor of life, reveals our horoscope to be a circle with a single theme.

Kundera puts it another way. (pg305 Immortality)

Let us imagine that the dial of Ruben’s life is placed on some great medieval clock, like the one in Old Town Square in Prague which I passed regularly for some twenty years. The clock strikes the hour and a little window above the dial opens: a marionette, a little girl of seven, comes out and asks Rubens what the time is. And then many years later, when that same slow hand comes round to the next number, a bell begins to sound , the window opens again, a marionette, this time a young woman emerges and asks him: ‘When you were young, did you think…’

And on Pg 346 he hears the clock strike again, sees the little window open and, thanks to the mysterious medieval mechanism, a woman in huge tennis shoes coming out. (he had just made love to her though it was a disappointment) Her appearance meant that his longing made a volte-face; he would no longer yearn for new women; he would only yearn for women he had already had; from now on, his longing would be an obsession with the past.

But how is one to be obsessed with the past when one sees it only as a desert over which the wind blows a few fragments of memories? Does that mean he would become obsessed with those few fragments? Yes one can be obsessed with fragments. He sits like Rodin’s Thinker remembering…..