Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
Interpretation
The quote explores the idea that extremes limit our perception of life and can lead to a desire for death.
In this quote, Milan Kundera discusses the concept of perception and its limitations, likening life to a vision that can be obstructed by both excessively bright lights, which can blind us, and total darkness, which obscures our view entirely. Kundera suggests that a fascination with extremes—whether in art or politics—reflects a deeper yearning for something beyond existence, ultimately leading to a rejection of balance and moderation in favor of a passionate engagement with life as it is.
In practice
In a philosophy class discussing the boundaries of perception.
Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
When you can whip any man in the world, you never know peace.
A person never knows their own true face. Everybody thinks that the phoney, posed social mask they wear is their real face.
If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen. We must know. We will know. Inscribed on his tomb in Gilttingen.
Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.
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