Kundera !

“A man longs to be immortal, and one day the camera will show us a mouth contorted into a pathetic grimace-the only thing we will remember about him, the only thing which will remain as a parabola of his entire life. He will enter a kind of immortality which we may call ridiculous. Tycho Brahe was a great astronomer, but all we remember about him today is that in the course of a festive dinner at the emperor’s court he was ashamed to go to the lavatory, so his bladder burst and he departed among the ridiculous immortals as a martyr to shame and urine. He departed among them just like Christiane Goethe, turned for ever into a crazy sausage that bites. No novelist is dear to me than Robert Musil. He died one morning while lifting weights. When I lift them myself, I keep anxiously checking my pulse and I am afraid of dropping dead, for to die with a weight in my hand like my revered author would make me an epigone so unbelievable, frenetic and fanatical as immediately to assure me of ridiculous immortality.”

Immortality, (p-56)

Back to p-55

“Of all the European statesmen of our time, the one who has most occupied himself with the thought of immortality (leaders like Narendra Modi?) has probably been Francois Mitterrand: I remember the unforgettable ceremony which followed his election as President in 1981. The square in front of the Pantheon was filled with an enthusiastic crowd and he was withdrawing from it: he was walking alone up the broad stairway (exactly as Shakespeare walked to the Temple of Fame on the curtain described by Goethe), holding the stems of three roses. Then he disappeared from the people’s sight and remained alone among the tombs of sixty-four illustrious corpses ,followed in his thoughtful solitude only by the eyes of the camera, the film crew and several million Frenchmen, watching their television screens, from which thundered Beethovan’s Ninth. He placed the roses one by one on three chosen tombs. He was surveyor, planting the three roses like three markers into the immense building –site of eternity, to stake out a triangle in the centre of which was to be erected the palace of his immortality."