Immortality

by Milan Kundera

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  trolling down a road in the other world, Hemingway saw a young man approaching him from a distance; he was elegantly dressed and held himself remarkably erect. As this dandy came closer, Hemingway could discern a slight, raffish smile on his face. When they were separated by just a few steps, the young man slowed his walk, as if he wanted to give Hemingway a last opportunity to recognize him. "Johann!" Hemingway exclaimed in surprise. Goethe smiled with satisfaction; he was proud that he had succeeded in producing such an excellent dramatic effect. Let's not forget that he had long been active as a theatrical director and had a sense of showmanship. He then took his friend by the arm (interestingly, even though he was now younger than Hemingway, he still behaved with the indulgence of the elderly) and took him on a leisurely walk.

  "Johann," said Hemingway, "today you look like a god." His friend's good looks caused him sincere joy, and he laughed happily: "Where did you leave your slippers? And that green eyeshade?" And after he stopped laughing, he said, "That's how you should come to eternal trial. To crush the judges not with arguments but with your beauty!"

  "You know, I didn't say one single word at the eternal trial. Out of contempt. But I couldn't keep myself from going there and listening to the proceedings. Now I regret it."

  "What do you want? You were condemned to immortality for the sin of writing books. You explained it to me yourself."

  Goethe shrugged and said with some pride, "Perhaps our books arc immortal, in a certain sense. Perhaps." He paused and then added softly, with great emphasis, "But we aren't."

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  "Quite the contrary," Hemingway protested bitterly. "Our books will probably soon stop being read. All that will remain of your Faust will be that idiotic opera by Gounod. And maybe also that line about the eternal feminine pulling us somewhere or other..."

  "Das Ewt0weibliche zieht uns hinan," recited Goethe.

  "Right. But people will never stop prying into your life, down to the smallest details."

  "Haven't you realized yet, Ernest, that the figures they talk about have nothing to do with us?"

  "Don't tell me, Johann, that you bear no relation to the Goethe about whom everybody writes and talks. I admit that the image that remained behind you is not entirely identical to you. I admit that it distorts you quite a bit. Still, you are present in it."

  "No, I'm not," Goethe said very firmly. "And I'll tell you something else. I am not even present in my books. He who doesn't exist cannot be present."

  "That's too philosophical for me."

  "Forget for a moment that you're an American and exercise your brain: he who doesn't exist cannot be present. Is that so complicated? The instant I died I vanished from everywhere, totally. I even vanished from my books. Those books exist in the world without me. Nobody will ever find me in them. Because you cannot find someone who does not exist."

  "I'd like to agree with you," said Hemingway, "but explain this to me: if the image you've left behind has nothing to do with you, why did you lavish so much care on it while you were still alive? Why did you invite Eckermann to join you? Why did you start writing Poetry and Truth?"

  "Ernest, resign yourself to the idea that I was as foolish as you. That obsession with one's own image, that's man's fatal immaturity. It is so difficult to be indifferent to one's image. Such indifference is beyond human strength. One becomes capable of it only after death. And even then it doesn't happen at once, but only a long time after death. You still haven't reached that point. You're still not mature. And yet you've been dead ... how long, actually?"

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  'Twenty-seven years," said Hemingway.

  'That's nothing. You'll have to wait at least another twenty or thirty years before you become fully aware that man is mortal and be able to draw all the consequences from that realization. It won't happen any sooner. Just shortly before I died I declared that I felt such creative power within me, it was impossible for it to disappear without a trace. And of course I believed that I would live in the image I left behind me. Yes, I was just like you. Even after death it was hard for me to accept the idea that I no longer existed. You know, it's really very peculiar. To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead."

  "And do you know how to be dead, Johann?" asked Hemingway, in order to lighten the gravity of the moment. "Do you really believe that the best way to be dead is to waste time chatting with me?"

  "Don't make a fool of yourself, Ernest," said Goethe. "You know perfectly well that at this moment we are but the frivolous fantasy of a novelist who lets us say things we would probably never say on our own. But to conclude. Have you noticed my appearance today?"

  "Didn't I tell you the moment I set eyes on you? You look like a god!"

  'This is how I looked when all Germany considered me a pitiless seducer," Goethe said with an almost grandiose air. Then, moved, he added, "I wanted you to take me with you into your future years in precisely this way."

  Hemingway looked at Goethe with sudden, gentle indulgence: "And you, Johann, how long have you lived since your death?"

  "One hundred and fifty-six," Goethe answered with some embarrassment.

  "And you still haven't learned how to be dead?"

  Goethe smiled. "I know, Ernest. I've been behaving differently from what I've been telling you just a moment ago. But I permitted myself this childish vanity, because today we are seeing each other for the last time." And then, slowly, as one who would speak no more, he said

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  these words: "You see, I have come to the definite conclusion that the eternal trial is bullshit. I have decided to make use of my death at last and, if I can express it with such an imprecise term, to go to sleep. To enjoy the delights of total nonexistence, which my great enemy Novalis used to say has a bluish color."

  PART FIVE

  Chance

  I

  After lunch she went back up to her room. It was Sunday, no new guests were expected, and nobody rushed her to check out; the broad bed was still unmade, just as she had left it in the morning. The sight of it filled her with bliss: she had spent two nights alone in it, heard nothing but her own breathing, and slept stretched out crosswise from one corner to the other, as if she wanted her body to embrace the whole of it, all that belonged only to her and to her sleep.

  Everything was already packed into the suitcase lying open on the table; on top of her folded skirt lay a paperback edition of Rimbaud's poetry. She had taken it along because during the last few weeks she had been thinking a great deal about Paul. Before Brigitte was born she had often traveled with him all over France, sitting behind him astride the big motorcycle. Her memories of that time and of that motorcycle mingled with her memories of Rimbaud: he was their poet.

  She glanced through those half-forgotten poems as if she were leafing through an old diary, curious whether its time-yellowed notes would now seem moving, ridiculous, fascinating, or meaningless. The verses were as beautiful as ever, but something about it surprised her: they had no connection whatever with the motorcycle they used to ride. The world of Rimbaud's poems was far closer to a person of Goethe's century than to Brigitte. Rimbaud, who had commanded everyone to be absolutely modern, was a poet of nature, a wanderer, and his poetry contained words that modern man had forgotten or no longer knew how to savor: crickets, elms, watercress, hazel trees, lime trees, heather, oak, delightful ravens, warm droppings of ancient dovecotes; and above all roads, roads and paths: In the blue summer evening I will go down the path, pricked by wheat, treading on the low grass... .1 will

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  not speak, I will not think.....And l will wander far, far like a gypsy, happy

  with nature as with a woman....

  She closed t
he small suitcase. Then she left the room, went briskly down the stairs to the hotel driveway, tossed the suitcase on the backseat of her car, and sat down behind the wheel.

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  2

  It was two-thirty and she should have been on her way, for she didn't like to drive at night. But she couldn't make herself turn the ignition key. Like a lover who has failed to say everything that is in his heart, the surrounding landscape stopped her from leaving. She got out of the car. There were mountains all around her; those on the left were clear and bright, and the whiteness of the glaciers shimmered above the green contours; the mountains on the right were wrapped in a yellowish haze that turned them into silhouettes. They were two different kinds of light; two different worlds. She kept turning her head from left to right and from right to left and then decided to take one last walk. She set out along a gentle path that led upward through meadows toward a forest.

  Some twenty-five years had already passed since she had come to the Alps with Paul on the big motorcycle. Paul loved the sea, and mountains were foreign to him. She wanted to win him over to her world; she wanted him to be enchanted by the views of trees and meadows. They parked the motorcycle at the edge of the road, and Paul said:

  "A meadow is nothing but a field of suffering. Every second some creature is dying in the gorgeous green expanse, ants eat wriggling earthworms, birds lurk in the sky to pounce on a weasel or a mouse. You see that black cat, standing motionless in the grass? She is only waiting for an opportunity to kill. I detest all that naive respect for nature. Do you think that a doe in the jaws of a tiger feels less horror than you? People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability for suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror and nothing but horror."

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  Paul was pleased that man was gradually covering the whole earth with concrete. It was as if he were watching a cruel murderess being walled up. Agnes understood him too well to resent his antipathy to nature, especially as it was motivated, if one can put it that way, by his humanity and sense of justice.

  And yet, perhaps it was really just the ordinary attempt of a jealous husband trying to snatch his wife away from her father. For it was Agnes's father who had taught her to love nature. She used to walk miles and miles of paths with him, relishing the silence of the woods.

  Once some friends drove her through the American countryside. It was an endless and impenetrable realm of trees intersected by long highways. The silence of those forests sounded as unfriendly and foreign to her as the noise of New York. In the kind of forest loved by Agnes, roads branch into smaller roads and still smaller paths; foresters walk those paths. Along the paths there are benches, from which you can enjoy a landscape full of grazing sheep and cows. This is Europe, this is the heart of Europe, this is the Alps.

  3

  Depuis huit jours, j'avais dechire mes bottines aux caillous des chemins.. . For eight days I had been scraping my shoes on the stones of the roads...

  writes Rimbaud.

  Road: a strip of ground over which one walks. A highway differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A highway is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.

  Before roads and paths disappeared from the landscape, they had disappeared from the human soul: man stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and to enjoy it. What's more, he no longer saw his own life as a road, but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another, from the rank of captain to the rank of general, from the role of wife to the role of widow. Time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be overcome by ever greater speed.

  Road and highway; these are also two different conceptions of beauty. When Paul says that at a particular place the landscape is beautiful, that means: if you stopped the car at that place, you might see a beautiful fifteenth-century castle surrounded by a park; or a lake reaching far into the distance, with swans floating on its brilliant surface.

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  In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.

  In the world of roads and paths, beauty is continuous and constantly changing; it tells us at every step: "Stop!"

  The world of roads was the world of fathers. The world of highways was the world of husbands. And Agnes's story closes like a circle: from the world of roads to that of highways, and now back again. For Agnes is moving to Switzerland. That decision has already been made, and this is the reason that throughout the last two weeks she has been feeling so continuously and madly happy.

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  4

  When she returned to the car it was already late afternoon. And at the very same moment that she was putting the key in the car door, Professor Avenarius, in swimming trunks, approached the Jacuzzi where I was already sitting in the warm water being bombarded by the violent currents under the surface.

  That's how events are synchronized. Whenever something happens in place Z, something else is happening in places A, B, C, D, and E. "At the very moment that..." is a magic sentence in all novels, a sentence that enchants us when we read The Three Musketeers, the favorite novel of Professor Avenarius, to whom I said in lieu of a greeting, "At the very moment that you stepped into the pool, the heroine of my novel finally turned the ignition key to begin her drive to Paris."

  "A wonderful coincidence," said Professor Avenarius, visibly pleased, and he submerged himself.

  "Of course, billions of such coincidences take place in the world every second. I dream of writing a big book: The Theory of Chance. The first part: the chance that governs coincidences. The classification of the various types of coincidences. For example: 'At the very moment that Professor Avenarius stepped into the Jacuzzi and felt the warm stream of water on his back, in a public park in Chicago a yellow leaf fell off a chestnut tree.' That is a coincidence, but without any significance. In my classification of coincidence I call it mute coincidence. But imagine me saying: 'At the very moment the first yellow leaf fell in Chicago, Professor Avenarius entered the Jacuzzi to massage his back.' The sentence becomes melancholy, because we now see Professor Avenarius as a harbinger of autumn and the water in which he is submerged now seems to us salty with tears. Coincidence breathed

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  unexpected significance into the event, and therefore I call it poetic coincidence. But I could also say what I told you when I saw you just now: 'Professor Avenarius submerged himself in the Jacuzzi at the very moment that, in the Swiss Alps, Agnes started her car.' That coincidence cannot be called poetic, because it gives no special significance to your entrance into the pool, and yet it is a very valuable kind of coincidence, which I call contrapuntal. It is like two melodies merging into one small composition. I know it from my childhood. One boy sang a song while another boy was singing a different one, and yet they went well together! But there is still one other type of coincidence: 'Professor Avenarius entered the Montparnasse Metro at the very moment a beautiful woman was standing there with a red collection box in her hand.' That is the so-called story-producing coincidence, adored by novelists."

  I paused after these remarks because I wanted to provoke him into telling me some details of his encounter in the Metro, but he only kept twisting his back to let the pounding stream of water massage his lumbago, and he looked as if my last example had nothing to do with him.

  "I can't help feeling," he said, "that coincidence in man's life is not determined by the degree of p
robability. What I mean is that often a coincidence happens to us that is so unlikely, we cannot justify it mathematically. Recently I was walking down a totally insignificant street in a totally insignificant district of Paris when I met a woman from Hamburg whom I used to see almost daily twenty-five years ago, and then I completely lost touch with her. I took that street only because by mistake I got off the Metro one stop too soon. And she was in Paris on a three-day visit and was lost. The probability of our meeting was one in a billion."

  "What method do you use to calculate the probability of human meetings?"

  "Do you happen to know of any method?"

  "I don't. And I regret it," I said. "It's odd, but human life has never been subjected to mathematical research. Take time, for example. I long for an experiment that would examine, by means of electrodes attached to a human head, exactly how much of one's life a person devotes to the

  Immortality

  present, how much to memories, and how much to the future. This would let us know who a man really is in relation to his time. What human time really is. And we could surely define three basic types of human being depending on which variety of time was dominant. But to come back to coincidence. What can we reliably say about coincidence in life, without mathematical research? Unfortunately, no existential mathematics exists as yet."

  "Existential mathematics. An outstanding idea," Avenarius said thoughtfully. Then he added, "In any event, whether it was a matter of one in a million or one in a billion, the meeting was absolutely improbable, and it was precisely this lack of probability that gave it value. For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability."

  'To meet unexpectedly in the middle of Paris a beautiful woman whom we hadn't seen in years ..." I said dreamily.