Immortality

by Milan Kundera

  "In his diary, Goethe mentions his first meeting with Bettina Bren-tano with only the words 'Mamsel Brentano.' The distinguished poet, author of Werther, gave domestic peace precedence over the active deliriums of passion [delires actifs de la passion]. And nothing of Bet-tina's imagination, nothing of her talents, was to disturb his Olympian dream. If Goethe had let himself be swept away by passion, perhaps his song might have descended to earth, but we would have loved him no less, for in those circumstances he probably would not have chosen his role of courtesan and would not have poisoned his people by trying to convince them that injustice was preferable to disorder."

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  JL hat lover was bestowed upon him," wrote Rilke, and we may wonder: what does this passive construction mean? In other words: who bestowed her upon him?

  A similar question occurs to us when we read this sentence from Bettina's letter to Goethe, dated June 15,1807: "I needn't be afraid to abandon myself to this feeling, for it wasn't I who planted it in my heart."

  Who planted it there? Goethe? Surely that is not what Bettina wished to say. The one who planted it in her heart was somebody above both Goethe and herself; if not God, then at least one of those angels invoked by Rilke in the passage quoted.

  At this point we can come to Goethe's defense: if somebody (God or angel) planted a feeling in Bettina's heart, it was natural for Bettina to obey that feeling: it was a feeling in her heart, it was her feeling. But it seems that nobody planted such a feeling in Goethe's heart. Bettina was "bestowed upon him." Assigned as a task. Auferlegt. Then how can Rilke blame Goethe for resisting a task that was assigned to him against his wishes and, so to speak, without any warning whatever? Why should he fall on his knees and write "with both hands" what a voice from on high was dictating to him?

  Obviously, we are not going to find a rational answer and must content ourselves with a comparison: let us think of Simon, fishing in the Sea of Galilee. Jesus approaches him and asks him to abandon his nets and follow him. And Simon replies, "Leave me alone. I prefer my nets and my fish." Such a Simon would immediately become a comic figure, a Falstaff of the New Testament, just as in Rilke's eyes Goethe had become a Falstaff of love.

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  Rilke says of Bettina's love that "it needs no reciprocity, it contains within itself both the challenge and the response; it answers its own prayer." A love that is planted in people's hearts by an angelic gardener needs no object, no response, no—as Bettina used to say— Gegenliebe (requited love). The beloved (Goethe, for instance) is neither the cause nor the object of love.

  At the time she corresponded with Goethe, Bettina also wrote love letters to Arnim. In one of them she said, 'True love [die wahre Liebe] is incapable of infidelity." Such a love, unconcerned about reciprocity (die Liebe ohne Gegenliebe), "looks for the beloved in every transformation."

  If love had been planted in Bettina not by an angelic gardener but by Goethe or Arnim, love would grow in her heart for Goethe or Arnim, an inimitable, uninterchangeable love, destined for him who planted it, for him who is beloved, and therefore a nontransformable, non-transferable love. Such a love can be defined as a relation: a privileged relation between two people.

  But what Bettina calls wahre Liebe (true love) is not love-relation but love-emotion: a fire lit by a divine hand in a human soul, a torch in whose light the lover "looks for the beloved in every transformation." Such a love (love-emotion) knows nothing of infidelity, for even when the object changes, the love itself remains perpetually the same flame lit by the same divine hand.

  At this point in our examination we begin to grasp why Bettina put so few questions to Goethe in her voluminous correspondence. My God, just imagine being able to correspond with Goethe! Think of all the things you'd want to ask him about! About his books. About the books of his contemporaries. About poetry. About prose. About paint-

  mgs. About Germany. About Europe. About science and technology. You'd flood him with questions until he'd be forced to express his views with the utmost precision. You'd press him into saying what he hadn't said before.

  But Bettina does not exchange opinions with Goethe. Nor does she discuss art with him. With one exception: she writes to him about music. But it is she who does the instructing! Goethe evidently is of a different opinion. Why is it that Bettina does not question him about the reasons for his disagreement? If she had known how to question him, Goethe's answers would have given us the first critique of musical Romanticism avant la, lettre!

  Alas, we'll find nothing of the kind in that voluminous correspondence, we'll find precious little about Goethe, simply because Bettina was far less interested in Goethe than we suspect; the cause and object of her love was not Goethe, but love.

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  urope has the reputation of a civilization based on reason. But one can say equally well that it is a civilization of sentiment; it created a human type whom I call sentimental man: homo sentimentalis.

  The Jewish religion imposes a law on its believers. This law wants to be accessible to reason (the Talmud is nothing but the perpetual rational analysis of God's commandments) and does not require any mysterious sense of the supernatural, no special enthusiasm or mystic flame in the soul. The criterion of good and evil is objective: it is a matter of understanding the written law and obeying it.

  Christianity turned this criterion inside out: love God, and do as you wish! said Saint Augustine. The criterion of good and evil was placed in the individual soul and became subjective. If a soul is filled with love, everything is in order: that man is good and everything he does is good.

  Bettina thinks like Saint Augustine when she writes to Arnim: "I found a beautiful saying: true love is always right, even when it is in the wrong. But Luther says in one of his letters: true love is often in the wrong. I don't find that as good as my dictum. Elsewhere, however, Luther says: love precedes everything, even sacrifice, even prayer. From this I deduce that love is the highest virtue. Love makes us unaware of the earthly and fills us with the heavenly; thus love frees us of guilt [macht unschuldig]"

  In the conviction that love makes us innocent lies the originality of European law and its theory of guilt, which takes into consideration the feelings of the accused: if you kill someone for money, in cold

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  blood, you have no excuse; if you kill him because he insulted you, your anger will be an extenuating circumstance and you'll get a lighter sentence; if you kill him out of unhappy love or jealousy, the jury will sympathize with you, and Paul, as your defense lawyer, will request that the murder victim be accorded the severest possible punishment.

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  Homo sentimentaLIs cannot be defined as a man with feelings (for we all have feelings), but as a man who has raised feelings to a category of value. As soon as feelings are seen as a value, everyone wants to feel; and because we all like to pride ourselves on our values, we have a tendency to show off our feelings.

  The transformation of feelings into a value had already occurred in Europe some time around the twelfth century: the troubadours who sang with such great passion to their beloved, the unattainable princess, seemed so admirable and beautiful to all who heard them that everyone wished to follow their example by falling prey to some wild upheaval of the heart.

  No one revealed homo sentimentaiis as lucidly as Cervantes. Don Quixote decides to love a certain lady named Dulcinea, in spite of the fact that he hardly knows her (this comes as no surprise, because we know that when it's a question of wahre Liebe, true love, the beloved hardly matters). In chapter twenty-five of Book One, he leaves with Sancho for the remote mountains, where he wishes to demonstrate to him the greatness of his passion. But how to show someone else that your soul is on fire? Especially to someone as dull and naive as Sancho? And so when they find themselves on a mountain path, Don Quixote strips off all his clothes except for his shirt, and to demonstrate to his servant the immensity of his passion he proc
eeds to turn somersaults. Each time he is upside down, his shirt slides down to his shoulders and Sancho gets a glimpse of his sex. The sight of the knight's small, virginal member is so comically sad, so heartrending, that Sancho, in spite of his callous heart, cannot bear to look at it any longer, mounts Rosinante, and gallops off.

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  When Father died, Agnes had to arrange the funeral ceremony. She wanted the ceremony to be free of any speeches and to consist only of the Adagio from Mahler's Tenth Symphony, one of her father's favorite pieces of music. But this music is extremely sad, and Agnes was afraid that she might not be able to hold back her tears during the ceremony. It seemed unbearable to her to cry in front of everyone; she therefore put the Adagio on the record player and listened to it. Once, twice, three times. The music reminded her of Father and she wept. But after the Adagio had resounded through the room eight, nine times, the power of the music faded; and after she had heard the record thirteen times, she found it no more moving than if she had been listening to the Paraguayan national anthem. Thanks to this training, she managed to stay dry-eyed throughout the funeral.

  It is part of the definition of feeling that it is born in us without our will, often against our will. As soon as we want to feel {decide to feel, just as Don Quixote decided to love Dulcinea), feeling is no longer feeling but an imitation of feeling, a show of feeling. This is commonly called hysteria. That's why homo sentimentaiis (a person who has raised feeling to a value) is in reality identical to homo hystericus.

  This is not to say that a person who imitates feeling does not feel. An actor playing the role of old King Lear stands on the stage and faces the audience full of the real sadness of betrayal, but this sadness evaporates the moment the performance is over. That is why homo sentimentaiis shames us with his great feelings only to amaze us a moment later with his inexplicable indifference.

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  Don Quixote was a virgin. Bettina first felt a man's hand on her breast at the age of twenty-five, when she was alone with Goethe in a Teplitz hotel room. If we can trust biographers, Goethe first experienced physical love during his trip to Italy, when he was almost forty years old. Soon after his return he met a twenty-three-year-old Weimar workingwoman and turned her into his first lasting mistress. She was Christiane Vulpius, who in 1806, after many years of cohabitation, became his legal wife, and who knocked off Bettina's glasses in that memorable year of 1811. She was faithfully devoted to her husband (it is said that she protected him with her own body when he was threatened by drunken soldiers from Napoleon's army), and she was evidently also an excellent lover, as we may judge from Goethe's joking reference to her as mein Bettschatz, my bed-treasure.

  Nevertheless, in Goethean hagiography Christiane finds herself outside the bounds of love. The nineteenth century (but also our own time, which is still imprisoned by the past century) refuses to admit Christiane into the gallery of Goethe's loves, alongside Frederika, Lotte, Lily, Bettina, and Ulrika. You may say that this is simply due to the fact that she was his wife and we have become accustomed to consider marriage automatically as something unpoetical. I believe, however, that the actual reason goes deeper: the public refuses to sec Christiane as one of Goethe's loves simply because Goethe slept with her. For love-treasure and bed-treasure were mutually exclusive entities. Nineteenth-century writers often ended their novels with marriage. This was not because they wanted to save the love story from marital boredom. No, they wanted to save it from intercourse!

  All the great European love stories take place in an extracoital setting: the story of the Princess of Cleves, the story of Paul and Virginia,

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  the story of Fromenrin's Dominique, who loves only one woman all his life without so much as kissing her, and of course the stories of Werther, of Hamsun's Viktoria, and Romain Rolland's story of Peter and Luce, which once made women readers weep across Europe. In his novel The Idiot Dostoevsky let Nastasia Filipovna sleep with any merchant who came along, but when real passion was involved, namely when she found herself torn between Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin, their sexual organs dissolved in their three great hearts like lumps of sugar in three cups of tea. The love of Anna Karenina and Vronski ended with their first sexual encounter, after which it became nothing hut a story of its own disintegration, and we hardly know why: had they made love so poorly? or, on the contrary, had they made love so beautifully that the intensity of their pleasure released a sense of guilt? No matter how we answer, we always reach the same conclusion: there was no great love after precoital love, and there couldn't be.

  This does not mean that extracoital love was innocent, angelic, childlike, pure; on the contrary, it contained every bit of hell imaginable in the world. Nastasia Filipovna went safely to bed with a lot of vulgar rich men, but from the moment she met Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin, whose sex organs, as I said, dissolved in the great samovar of feeling, she found herself in the region of catastrophe and died. Or let me remind you of that beautiful scene in Fromentin's Dominique: the two lovers, who yearned for each other for years without ever as much as touching, went out riding, and the gentle, refined, reserved Madeleine proceeded to whip her horse into a mad gallop because she knew that Dominique, who followed her and was a bad rider, might get killed. Extracoital love: a pot on the fire, in which feeling boils to a passion and makes the lid shake and dance like a soul possessed.

  The concept of European love has its roots in extracoital soil. The twentieth century, which boasts that it liberated morals and likes to laugh at romantic feelings, was not capable of filling the concept of love with any new content (this is one of its debacles), so that a young European who silently pronounces that great word to himself willy-nilly returns on the wings of enthusiasm to precisely the same point where Werther lived his great love for Lotte and where Dominique nearly fell off his horse.

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  ypically, just as Rilke admired Bettina, he also admired Russia and for a certain period of time liked to think of it as his spiritual homeland. For Russia is the land of Christian sentimentality par excellence. It escaped both the rationalism of medieval scholastic philosophy and the Renaissance. The modern age, based on Cartesian critical thought, only penetrated there after a lag of some one or two hundred years. Homo sentimentalis thus failed to find there a sufficient counterweight and became his own hyperbole commonly known as the Slavic soul.

  Russia and France are the two poles of Europe that exercise eternal mutual attraction. France is an old, tired country where nothing remains of feelings but forms. A Frenchman may write at the end of a letter: "Be so kind, dear sir, as to accept the assurance of my delicate feelings." The first time I got such a letter, signed by a secretary of the publishing house Gallimard, I was still living in Prague. I jumped in the air for joy: in Paris there is a woman who loves me! She managed to slip a declaration of love into a business letter! She not only has feelings for me, but she expressly states that they are delicate! Never in my life had a Czech woman said anything of the kind to me!

  Only years later was it explained to me in Paris that there exists a whole semantic repertory of closing formulas for letters; thanks to these formulas a Frenchman can determine with the precision of a pharmacist the most subtle degree of feelings that he wants to transmit to the addressee, without feeling them himself; on this scale, "delicate feelings" expresses the lowest degree of official politeness bordering almost on contempt.

  Oh France, you are the land of Form, just as Russia is the land of

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  Feeling! That is why the Frenchman, eternally frustrated by not feeling any flame burning in his breast, gazes with envy and nostalgia toward the land of Dostoevsky, where men offer their puckered lips to other men and would cut the throat of anyone refusing their kiss. (Besides, if they did cut anyone's throat they would be forgiven immediately, for it was their in
jured love that made them do it, and, as we know from Bettina, love makes people innocent. A lovesick murderer will find at least a hundred and twenty lawyers in Paris ready to send a special train to Moscow to defend him. They will not be driven to do so by compassion—a feeling too exotic and seldom practiced at home—but by abstract principles, their sole passion. The Russian murderer will fail to understand this, and once free will rush at his French defense lawyer to hug him and kiss him on the mouth. The Frenchman will back away in horror, the Russian will take offense, plunge a knife into his body, and the whole story will repeat itself like the song about the dog and the crust of bread.)

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  H, the Russians...

  While I was still living in Prague, the following anecdote went around about the Russian soul: a Czech man seduces a Russian woman with devastating speed. After intercourse, the Russian woman says to him with boundless contempt, "You had my body. But you'll never have my soul!"

  A splendid anecdote. Bettina wrote a total of forty-nine letters to Goethe. The word "soul" appears fifty times, the word "heart" one hundred and nineteen times. The word "heart" is seldom used in a literal anatomic sense ("my heart pounded"); more often it is used as a synecdoche designating the breast ("I would like to press you to my heart"); but in the vast majority of cases it means the same as the word "soul": the feeling self.

  I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.