The trap the world has become
I am reading The Art of the Novel, where Milan Kundera, in conversation with Christian Salmon, is asked to explain what he means by the term “trap” as used in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In the book Kundera writes, “The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”
Kundera answers:
We are born without having asked to be, locked in a body we never chose, and destined to die. On the other hand, the wideness of the world used to provide a constant possibility of escape. A soldier could desert from the army and start another life in a neighboring country.
Suddenly, in our century, the world is closing around us. The decisive event in that transformation of the world into a trap was surely the 1914 war, called (and for the first time in history) a world war. ... the adjective "world" expresses all the more eloquently the sense of horror before the fact that, henceforward, nothing that occurs on the planet will be a merely local matter, that all catastrophes concern the entire world, and that consequently we are more and more determined by external conditions, by situations that no one can escape and that more and more make us resemble one another.
Kundera wrote this after the First World War, yet I find it still relevant today.
