I saw a great film on BBC Four, a French one called “Nothing about Robert”. There was this crazy girl, as is quite the norm in all French films, and she basically lures this middle-aged intellectual away from his girlfriend, who’s another loon, because she walks up a stranger in the park and asks him for a shag, and then proceeds to describe the affair to her boyfriend. In all this, there was the mention of Kundera, which reminded me that I had bought ‘Immortality’ and hadn’t finished reading it; another book that I kept on-the-go and then forgot about. So I dug it up. A quote from this book is appropriate right about here..
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 sentimentalis (a person who has raised feeling to a value) is in reality identical to homo hystericus.
By the way, is there a French film that doesn’t have a scene where a group of people sit around a dinner table discussing art and/or literature. And the words existentialist and/or post-idealist are used?
