Milan Kundera, slowness and imprecision

Of all Milan Kundera’s novels, I loved “La Lentezza” more than the others, almost a treatise, a philosophy. Applied to modernity, that book passes over the absurdity of this exponential existence that overwhelms feelings and reduces them to dust, and invites us to reflect on how time is a relative concept, almost non-existent to put it in St. Augustine. Then, of course, a writer plays with time, bending it to his will, to the needs of the script. A writer chases a blank sheet beyond which there are words. How long does it take to reach them? Even a lifetime is not important, what matters is what is written, not the measure of how long it took to do it.

Slowness helps us to observe the world and to understand it much better, to make less mistakes, to be even more courageous, of that courage which is not instinct, fury (fury causes damage), but awareness, and therefore reason, perhaps fear, but not for this self-pity. Struck by those inexplicable suggestions that in the summer, with the heat, expand until they become boiling oil, I find myself strongly attracted by everything that moves slowly, as if the old Milan (the writer) had taken possession of me (maybe it was!), in the hours of his disappearance. And all those memories associated with slowness, with the chronometric measurement of a step, or a passage, overwhelm me.

And since about forty-one years ago, these days, our national team won the World Cup, those scenes of the triumph against Brazil came to mind. And all I remember, filtered by the images of an almost cubic cathode TV, is a slow gait. Paolo Rossi, emaciated and tragic in his face marked by the effort to come back to the surface, launches a shot from distance that Valdir Peres, hotel goalkeeper, barely touches. It is the goal of two to one. That shot, which at the time seemed like a rocket to me, today I remember as unrealistic, weak. There is an inexplicable slowness in my memory, because Pablito actually kicked hard even if he was central (but for the Brazilian goalkeeper his home was a hotel). And then I think, you see that everything is relative, even time, measured at the time, the youth that blurs and clouds any image. Yet I like this indistinct dimension that allows us to glimpse, perhaps even misunderstand with fascinating imprecision. The light now envelops us, time runs like a useless speech. Everything ages so prematurely that only slowness, dear Milan, will make us young forever.