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February 4, 2007
Remebrance of Things Past
The other day I ran across the following, from Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being:
A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular heartbeats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the body. The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, and marvelled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
Today, of course, the body is no longer unfamiliar; we know that the beating in our chest is the heart and that the nose is the nozzle of a hose sticking out of the body to take oxygen into the lungs. The face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the body mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration, thought.
Ever since man has learned to give each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble. He has also learned that the soul is nothing more than the grey matter of the brain in action. The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice.
But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.
What power that quote had to take me back to the time and place in my life where I'd read that novel. I marvelled, and perhaps mourned a bit, when I thought of how different I had been. I still believed in the power of things that now seem futile to me.
Posted by dag at February 4, 2007 3:26 PM