2023-07-20 22:54:17
In his latest novel, “The Banquet of Insignificance,” Milan Kundera (who passed away from our world this week) tells this story: Russian leader Joseph Stalin decided one day to go hunting, so he wore ski boots, strapped on a long hunting rifle, and traveled 13 kilometers. Then, he saw partridges perched on a tree in front of him. He started shooting at them, killing 12 birds from them, then he went back to travel 13 kilometers to his house once more, took 12 bullets once more and traveled the same distance to find the partridges still perched on the same branch waiting for the shots… So he started shooting at them, then went to collect his catch.
The story was among the stories of Kundera’s “Party of Insignificance”, which is the party that people enter in the hope of cutting time, or enjoying the bliss of (unreasonable) and (meaninglessness). In atrocities, in bloody battles, in the worst misfortunes!
In the story of the partridges… It is not important that people believe Stalin when he tells this story, no one dares to disbelieve Stalin, to say whatever he wants! (The novel) says: Khrushchev (Stalin’s successor) recounted the story of the partridges in his memoirs, as Stalin recounted it in his small council, but “no one laughed, everyone without exception found what Stalin told absurd, and they were disgusted by his lie, but they were silent… Only Khrushchev encouraged and told Stalin what was in his mind: Do you really mean that the partridges did not leave their branch? Khrushchev said… Stalin replied: Exactly it remained crouched in the same place…! This is how the story becomes.
In Kundera’s opinion, “It is not meant to get acquainted with banality – meaninglessness, but to get attached to it and learn how to fall in love with it…”, he adds sarcastically: “Breathe this banality that surrounds us. It is the key to wisdom, the key to a good mood and contentment.”
In this novel, Kundera brings together four young men in Paris, each of whom represents a story of a different type, all of which have no meaning, except for killing the void, and telling stories with different flavors. Indomitable and he enjoyed teasing people with this lie… It was a form of absurdity; Was Saddam Hussein serious when he showed the world his literary genius when he published the novel “Get out of it, you cursed one” in which he introduced himself as one of the people of literature and culture, then he was not content with its helpless local reader, so he began translating it into various languages of the world…? And on mentioning (curse); Muammar Gaddafi also issued similar titles within his series of books: “The cursed family of Jacob,” “The herb of disloyalty and the cursed tree,” and “Long live the state of despicable people”… of course; After he surprised the world with a torrent of theories since he launched the “Third Universal Theory” in his “Green Book”, then his amazing book “The Village… The Village, the Earth… The Earth, and the Astronaut’s Suicide”… Some of these books have become curricula that students receive in their schools and grow up on…!
We do not enter the “party of insignificance” under any circumstances. There are those who enter it voluntarily, and also ecstatic. Perhaps what is being circulated through messaging and communication programs is part of the rituals of this party. Estimates indicate that the average hours spent by one of us in following social media reaches six hours a day … Most of it is in following social media stars and fashionistas, and a large torrent of video clips that do not add anything to knowledge, but most of them contribute to adding tension and falsification. Consciousness and sabotage the psychological tranquility of man.
In the world, too, they love insignificance; The amount of wars and conflicts, making enmities and destroying the environment, starving people and displacing them, proves that the “party of insignificance” that Kundera depicts, in order to reach (meaninglessness) and deny the value of life, is the state that prevails in the world, and makes it indifferent to the challenges of the present and the aspirations of the future …
The strange thing is that Kundera wrote this short novel following he was over eighty years old. He wanted to present a final work testifying to him that he had read The Book of Life before leaving it sarcastically. Before that, he presented what was presented: “The Book of Laughter and Oblivion” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
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#date #Party #Insignificance..
