Picture © Sarolta Gyoker, who posted it here.This morning, I started reading Kundera's Slowness, a book I had kinda perused through some years back but not really read, and really enjoyed this wonderful paragraph:
"Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: 'they are gazing at God's windows.' A person gazing at God's windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for an activity he lacks.""Gazing at God's Windows" would make for a a great blog's title. :)
2 comments:
Brilliant prose!
The book is not as good (in my humble opinion) as some of his earlier work. If you have not read Kundera, Atish.. you should read his
# The Joke
# The Farewell Waltz/Party
# Life Is Elsewhere (
# The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
# The Unbearable Lightness of Being
My favorite is perhaps The Book of ...
All others were also actually pretty good. Have Immortality that came after the above 5 but have not read it and skipped over to Slowness, as it is a shorter book. (No patience or rather discipline to read longer books these days!)
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