Those Milan Kundera novels haven’t aged well, amirite?

A defense of philosophy for adults

A few months ago, I was at a Cuban coffee shop in the middle of Los Angeles asking a friend about her latest dating adventures in the massive multiplayer game of Tinder. There was one promising candidate, she admitted with a kind of suppressed smile that betrayed her disinterested tone. (Clearly, she was super into him.) She marketed his selling points: French Canadian, brooding, attractive, well read. “But there are two problems,” she continued as her small dog nodded to sleep on her lap. “First he’s a few years younger than me and I’ve never dated anyone younger.” I let her comment slide, pocketing my practiced diatribe about the hypocrisies of gender, age, and romance. “Second, he really likes to talk about existential philosophy, and isn’t that a little adolescent?”

Philosophy as adolescent? This I could not let slide. I echoed a defense that I had heard recently on a podcast:

You might think, why worry that the world may not be what it seems when there’s laundry to do? And I just want to invite people to flip that around and ask themselves, why do the laundry if the world may not be what it seems?

Another friend once confessed to me his relief that he has so much work to stay busy each day to keep him from ruminating about, you know, the big questions. He’s happy to take the blue pill and chill. I opt for the red pill. I like to ask the big questions. I like it when other people ask the big questions. But I like to be happy too, and it wasn’t until I was introduced to the novels of Milan Kundera that I discovered a sensibility that is both philosophical and lighthearted.

Even as an unwoke 20-year-old at the turn of the new millennium, I was aware that Kundera’s treatment of women in his novels is, as we’d call it today, problematic. And yet, his writing is unmatched in embedding philosophical ideas with lighthearted laughter into relatable stories. It was a revelation: I could be philosophical without being sad. I could question the nature of truth and party like a rockstar. I could do the laundry, yes, while at the same time wondering if the world is not what it seems.

To this day, I feel an immediate connection to anyone with a special place in their heart for Kundera’s novels, especially his early works. If that is you, please let me know. Kundera will turn 94 on April Fool’s Day, an appropriate birthday for the mischievous writer. Ten days later, a collection of his essays about “the small nations” of Central Europe will be reprinted in a new volume. I’m looking forward to rereading them twenty years later under the shadow of Russia’s renewed imperialist ambitions.

📖 Book Review: Red Pill

Three of my top ten favorite novels are by Kundera: Immortality, The Joke, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I just updated the list, discarding Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom for Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill. Here’s an excerpt from my review:

Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill was my paperback companion during a fall 2021 vacation to Portugal with Iris. I was sitting on the white sand of a Portuguese beach, the sun warming my skin after an ocean swim, and excited to crack open my holiday novel. I was rested, happy, and ready for the opening paragraph to suck me into a great story. Instead, Kunzru offered me this just a few months after I turned 41:

I think it is possible to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings. So this is where I am, you say to yourself. This is what I have become. It is when you first understand that your condition — physically, intellectually, socially, financially is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story. What you have done cannot be undone, and much of what you have been putting off for “later” will never get done at all. In short, your time is a finite and dwindling resource. From this moment on, whatever you are doing, whatever joy or intensity or whirl of pleasure you may experience, you will never shake the almost-imperceptible sensation that you are traveling on a gentle downward slope into darkness.

LOL. Did I want to keep reading?

Full review here.

🧑‍🎓 A Philosophy Professor’s Final Class

I was moved by Jordi Graupera‘s piece in the New Yorker about the last two classes by philosopher Richard J. Bernstein before he passed away last year. Or more accurately: as he passed away. (He was hooked up to assisted oxygen while lecturing on Zoom from his hospital bed.) Graupera perfectly describes the anxiety and vulnerability that graduate students must suffer as they struggle to apply the old ideas of dead philosophers to the experiences of their rather brief lives.

He charts the complicated inheritance of big ideas between imperfect people. Twenty years her junior, Bernstein described Arendt’s energy as “agonistic and erotic” when they argued for hours about philosophy after dinner. While he struggled with her “provocative ambiguity,” he admired her brilliance and they remained lifelong friends and supporters. After all, their philosophical disagreements were minor compared to their shared commitment to save the philosophy department at the New School as it struggled with dwindling enrollment. Similarly, Bernstein struck up a lifelong friendship with Habermas upon reading one of his books. After picking him up at the airport, they fell into deep bromance while arguing about the limits and constraints of post-truth identity politics (in 1976, mind you).

I am not motivated to sign up (or pay) for a graduate program in philosophy. But I do enjoy discussing philosophical ideas, especially with fun, witty people with a Kunderian sensibility. If that’s you, I’d happily invite you out for a bottle of wine or, even better, a tequila and a cheap beer.

🧰 A useful tool: The Readwise Reader Daily Review

Two weeks ago, I plugged Readwise’s new Reader app as a powerful tool to read and highlight the web. There is a companion app, the original Readwise, which offers a daily (or weekly or monthly or whatever you want) review of past highlights from your previous books and articles. It’s a great way to quickly remember what you enjoyed about previous reads. Whenever I’m tempted to tap my thumb on Instagram or Twitter while waiting in line, I open Readwise instead and am always better off for it.

I wish I had my highlights and notes from all the Kundera books I read in my early 20s.

🎵 A song

I included Beth Orton’s latest among my favorite albums from 2022. Somehow I have gone the past 26 years without ever hearing this 7-minute, Chemical Brothers track from 1997 with her inimitable voice chanting:

Sunday morning, I’m waking up
Can’t even focus on the coffee cup
Don’t even know whose bed I’m in
Where do I start, where do I begin?

It’s such a slow build-up. The drop doesn’t come until 3:13 and then it goes into full 1990s-rave-in-the-desert mode. 🌵 💊 🔥 Aww, the good ol’ days.

I’m sending this out during a layover at Charles de Gaulle airport, where I’m drinking strong espresso, trying to not think about the time back home, and rereading a Kundera short story that was reissued a couple of years ago by Faber and Faber. Somehow I must stay awake for the next 12 hours. Wish me luck.

And have a great week!

David