Readings I Recommend

  • Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
  • Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
  • It's Beginning to Hurt by James Lasdun
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • The Man Who was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
  • Identity by Milan Kundera
  • A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
  • Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Additional Blogs I Recommend

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Dream Quote

I'm currently reading Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". In the sixteenth chapter, Tereza (the wife of the protagonist, Tomas) explains the impact her dreams have on her reality.

"The dreams left nothing to be deciphered. The accusation the leveled at Tomas was so clear that his only reaction was to hang his head and stroke her hand without a word.

The dreams were eloquent, but they were also beautiful. That aspect seems to have escaped Freud in his theory of dreams. Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine-to dream about things that have not happened-is among mankind's deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten. But Tereza kept coming back to her dreams, running through them in her mind, turning them into legends. Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams."

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