Milan Kundera

From "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"

Dror's translation

(Part2, Chap6)

Every love relationship relies on unwritten conventions that the two people in love have accepted blindly during the first weeks of their love. They are still in a sort of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, they are writing down, as incorruptible lawyers, the terms of their contract. Oh! lovers, be careful in these first dangerous days! If you bring the other one its breakfast in bed, you will have to bring it forever, if you don't want to be accused of non-love and treason.

(Part4, Chap1)

You know what happens when two people chat: one is talking and the other one interrupts: "it's exactly like me, I..." and he/she starts speaking about him/herself until the first one manages to interrupt by saying: "it's exactly like me, I..."

This sentence, "it's exactly like me, I..." seems like an approving echo, a way of pursuing the other one's reflection, but it's a fake: in reality it's a brutal revolt against a brutal violence, an effort for liberating its ear from slavery and an attempt to occupy the enemy's ear. Because man's life among the others is nothing but a struggle for the conquest of one's ear.