Heartlessness masked by a style overflowing with feeling". This line expresses Kundera's polemic view on novels, music, arts and appreciation of all these things in general. Come to think of it, they're not polemic ideas but something all of us as readers can easily sense but often expel from us for the sake of "feeling" things and satisfying the urge to endow meanings and purposes to the meaningless. The desire to make sense of every moment, to categorize our experience in a spectrum of what we call "emotions" for want of something concrete, something we can give name to, something we tell other about. Kundera thinks of reality as something always fleeting and in the past; we can only know our present as an abstraction - after thoughts, memory of sensations that have passed, which we try to give shapes to but can't. Maybe that's why we stick to cliches and nostalgia, as they're more easily communicated. These tendencies make us betrayers of dying wishes, make us misinterpret Kafka, Stravinsky, Janacek as riddle-givers whose work is potent with hidden meanings because we think 1. They lack feelings. 2. They have feeling but these feelings are inconsistent and confusing, therefore they must be allegories.
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