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. . . She walked around the pool toward the exit. She passed the
lifeguard, and after she had gone some three or four steps beyond him, she
turned her head, smiled, and waved to him. At that instant I felt a pang
in my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old
girl! Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully
tossing a brightly colored ball to her lover. That smile and that gesture
had charm and elegance, while the face and the body no longer had any
charm. It was the charm of a gesture drowning in the charmlessness of the
body. But the woman, though she must of course have realized that she was
no longer beautiful, forgot that for the moment. There is a certain part
of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our
age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless. In
any case, the instant she turned, smiled, and waved to the young lifeguard
(who couldn't control himself and burst out laughing), she was unaware of
her age. The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself
for a second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved. And
then the word Agnes entered my mind. Agnes. I had never known a woman by
that name.
Immortality
The Czech writer Milan Kundera, b. Apr. 1, 1929, has
lived in France since 1975, persuaded to self-exile by the censoring or
suppression of his work by the government of his native country. Kundera
has long denied any political motivation in his writings, however. His
work is always humorous, skeptical, and fundamentally pessimistic in
describing the universal human condition, whether under Communism or
elsewhere. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979; Eng.
trans., 1980) is his most celebrated novel. Other highly regarded works
include The Joke (1967; Eng. trans., 1982); Laughable
Loves, a collection of short stories originally published in the
1960s (Eng. trans., 1974); Life Is Elsewhere (1969; Eng. trans.,
1974); and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984; Eng. trans.,
1984). In The Art of the Novel (1988), a collection of essays,
Kundera repeats his conviction that the novel must be "autonomous,"
created independent of any system of political belief.
Text Copyright © 1993 Grolier
Incorporated
"Modern stupidity means not ignorance
but the nonthought of received ideas."
Kundera on the Web
Milan Kundera at Amazon.Com
"But if God is gone
and man is no longer master,
then who is master?"
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