Thursday, October 29, 2009

Litost

Was reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera and came across this interesting word called Litost.

Here's the passage verbatim i stole from somewhere...

What is Litost?
Litost is an untranslatable Czech word. Its first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog. As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.

Let me give an example: The student went swimming in the river one day with his girlfriend, a fellow student. She was athletic, but he was a very poor swimmer. He could not time his breathing properly and swam slowly, his head held tensely high above the surface. She was madly in love with him and tactfully swam as slowly as he did. But when their swim was coming to an end, she wanted to give her athletic instincts a few moments’ free rein and headed for the opposite bank at a rapid crawl. The student made an effort to swim faster too and swallowed water. Feeling humbled, his physical inferiority laid bare, he felt litost. He recalled his sickly childhood, lacking in physical exercise and friends and spent under the constant gaze of his mother’s overfond eye, and fell into despair about himself and his life. They walked back to the city together in silence on a country lane. Wounded and humiliated, he felt an irresistible desire to hit her. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked him, and he started to reproach her: she knew about the current near the other bank, and that he had forbidden her to swim there because of the risk of drowning - and then he slapped her face. The girl began to cry, and when he saw the tears on her cheeks, he took pity on her and put his arms around her, and his litost melted away.

Or take an instance from the student’s childhood: His parents made him take violin lessons. He was not very gifted and his teacher would interrupt him to criticize his mistakes in a cold, unbearable voice. He felt humiliated, and he wanted to cry. But instead of trying to play in tune and not make mistakes, he would deliberately play wrong notes, the teacher’s voice would become still more unbearable and harsh, and he himself would sink deeper and deeper into his litost.

What then is litost?

Litost
is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.

One of the customary remedies for misery is love. Because someone loved absolutely cannot be miserable. All his faults are redeemed by love’s magical gaze, under which even inept swimming, with the head held high above the surface, can become charming.

Love’s absolute is actually a desire for absolute identity: the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost.

Anyone with wide experience of the common imperfection of mankind is relatively sheltered from the shocks of litost. For him, the sight of his own misery is ordinary and uninteresting. Litost, therefore, is characteristic of the age of inexperience. It is one of the ornaments of youth.

Litost works like a two-stroke engine. Torment is followed by the desire for revenge. The goal of revenge is to make one’s partner look as miserable as oneself. The man cannot swim, but the slapped woman cries. It makes them feel equal and keeps their love going.

Since revenge can never reveal its true motive (the student cannot confess to the girl that he slapped her because she swam faster than he did), it must put forward false reasons. Litost, therefore, is always accompanied by pathetic hypocrisy: the young man proclaims he is terrified his girlfriend will drown, and the child incessantly playing off key feigns an irremediable lack of talent.

~

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Whipped by neon



Life continues to be plain sailing without you, just like driving aimlessly at night, getting lost in the sea of neon lights. Perhaps I was looking for you but I was not sure about it.

I felt a jolt each time I thought i drove past that familiar figure of yours walking along the pavement, thinking where you have been, the joy and laughter you had, debonairness that I once knew about you.

If it were really you, and I bravely swerve the car to a corner, pull off by the road and get off to catch hold of you, holding you tightly by your arms, will u feel the same jolt that I get? Will that skinny frame that I fiercely clamp my hands upon be yours? Or does it belong to a mistaken random soul who would soon after slip out from my hands and return to join the party crowd, leaving me desperate for a cigarette under the piercing neon lights?

Where exactly is my destination?

~

Thursday, October 08, 2009

Relief

You should have seen it in his eyes. Unspeakable joy and relief.

We were just waiting for the doctor to utter those words. Even the contents of the biopsy report didn't matter. Papa shook the doctor's hands fiercely and told him he was an excellent doctor. And the doctor just went "huh?"

It's been something like 10 months since the battle began. And from what it seems right now, we have emerged the victors.

As Papa stepped out of the clinic, he dug into his pockets for his cellphone and eagerly called his closest elder brother to inform of the gd news, like a little boy calling home to inform big bro that he has gloriously beaten up some son of a bitch in school.

I leaned over my umbrella and heaved a sigh of relief, thinking from this point on, things will only get better...and they better be.

~

Sunday, October 04, 2009

二五仔

Good old days of striking resemblances..haha

我地都係警察!






~終極無間~

Saturday, October 03, 2009

Ernest wants to read about....


Vince Lombardi


Evita Peron


Cultural Revolution


Can someone recommend a title for each?

~

Thursday, October 01, 2009

一個工作狂的半點苦水

今天傍晚,我拖著疲憊的身心走出了辦公室。在地鐵列車上,我開始繼續閲讀手裏拿的書,過了一會兒便找到了位子坐了下來。

讀著,讀著。。。視線開始模了糊。我把書本放了下來,過後便睡着了。奇怪的是一到了目的地站,身體便自然而然醒了過來。真是神奇。

無論再疲倦,身理鈡始終不打亂。節律也一點不放慢,接著便順著人群以同樣沉重的腳步離開了地鐵站。


究竟何日才能打亂這日復一日的工作生活韻律,享有自己定下的拍子,聆聽世界停頓的寂靜呢?

我很期待那一天的到來。

~