Saturday, January 17, 2015

A Carcass and The Unbearable Lightness of Being

While reading this stanza in "A Carcass:" "The shapes wore away as if only a dream Like a sketch that is left on the page which the artist forgot and can only complete on the canvas, with memory's aid," I thought of the Unbearable Lightness quote where Kundera also mentions a sketch in relation to a person's life: "That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a world, because a sketch is an an out of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing an outline with no picture."  I find the comparison of how Baudelaire and Kundera relate life to a sketch interesting.. Baudelaire is saying that as times passes, the mark of one's life starts to become like a sketch because it begins to fade because people begin to forget the whole picture or image of someone's life. Kundera however is arguing that life is like a sketch because it doesn't represent a more complete image because, once we die, our lives will be forgotten. Both mention a sketch as having a relationship to life, because a sketch represents something that is fading and not full, which will in the end be forgotten.

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