Compassion. And Co-feeling

“All languages that derive from Latin form the word “compassion” by combining the prefix meaning “with” (com-) and the root meaning “suffering” (Late Latin, passio). In other languages—Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance—this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with that word that means “feeling” (Czech, sou-cit; Polish, współ-czucie; German: Mit-gefühl; Swedish, med-känsla).

In languages that derive from Latin, “compassion” means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, “pity” (French, pitié; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. “To take pity on a woman” means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.

This is why the word “compassion” generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.

In languages that form the word “compassion” not from the root “suffering” but from the root “feeling,” the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult.

The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion—joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit,współczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximum capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy.

In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.”

Milan Kundera, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’

Look

“...We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.

The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public.

The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives.

Then there is the third category, the category of the people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of the people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark.

And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers. Franz, for example. He traveled to the borders of Cambodia only for Sabina. As the bus bumped along the Thai road, he could feel her eyes fixed on him in a long stare.

So also, Tomas’s estranged son, Simon. He wrote a letter to Tomas. He did not ask him to write back. He only wanted him to focus his eyes on his life. And later on, after Tomas’ death, he searched and found the address of his mistress. Because he desperately needed an imaginary eye to follow his life, he would occasionally write her long letters.”

'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'
Milan Kundera

Repetition

"And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition."

'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', Milan Kundera

A very good commentary on the book, here.

The Limits of the Self

Just when you think you have read every possible thing by a favorite author, and you feel abandoned to your loneliness once again, you discover yet another book by him. Happiness. Milan Kundera, brother-soul. (Mais quelle audace!)

"I could put it differently: Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?"

Page 7, Essay 1: 'The Painter's Brutal Gesture: On Francis Bacon', from 'Encounter', essays by Milan Kundera

Photo from Google Images

Weight

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos...

Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"...If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant."

Milan Kundera
'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'

Memory

".................for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Emigrés gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable.

But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena (character in the novel) or Odysseus, are inevitably struck with amnesia. The stronger the nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot.

For nostalgia does not heighten memory's activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else."

'Ignorance' (page 33)
Milan Kundera

Adventure

"……but the greatest sorrow of our lives is the absence of adventure. Ulysses fought at Troy, came back crossing the seas, guided his ship himself, had a mistress in each island- no, our lives are not like that. The odyssey of Homer has moved inwards; it has been internalized. The islands, the sea, the sirens who seduce us, Ithacca that calls us back, these, now, are only the voices of our inner being…."

Milan Kundera
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Nostlagia

".................for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Emigrés gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable.

But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena (character in the novel) or Odysseus, are inevitably struck with amnesia. The stronger the nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot.

For nostalgia does not heighten memory's activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else."

'Ignorance' (page 33)
Milan Kundera

Ignorare

"The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering". So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: anoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portugese.

In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness". Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: soknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimpra: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence")

In Spanish anoranza comes from the verb anorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss). In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there."

Page 5, "Ignorance"Milan Kundera

Atlas

"...Unlike Parmenides, Beethoven apparently viewed weight as something positive. Since the German word schwer means both "difficult" and "heavy", Beethoven's "difficult resolution" may also be construed as a "heavy" or "weighty resolution". The weighty resolution is at one with the voice of Fate ("Es muss sein!"); necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.

This is a conviction born of Beethoven's music, and although we cannot ignore the possibility (or even probability) that it owes its origins more to Beethoven's commentators than to Beethoven himself, we all more or less share it: we believe that the greatness of man stems from the fact that he bears his fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders. Beethoven's hero is a lifter of metaphysical weights."

Page 33, 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', Milan Kundera