Milan Kundera's description of conversation -- what book is it in?
May 21, 2013 4:01 PM   Subscribe

In one of Kundera's books, he describes conversation so aptly that I've been using his description (with attribution) for years. But I really feel like I should quote it exactly and for as long as I've been paraphrasing him, I've been trying to remember which damn book it's in so that I can stop paraphrasing and start quoting. Help me, hive mind!

His description (which is probably only a sentence or two) is something to this effect: All conversations are the same. In every conversation, someone says, "I..." and the person they're talking to replies, "Oh, I know! I also...", to which the first person says, "Yes, I..." and the other one responds, "And I..."

I think it's brilliant and so true and I sure do wish I could find it again. I have tried google including google reader and I've also looked through all the Kundera books I own, but I very well may have read it in a paperback that I later got rid of.

You're my last hope, MeFis!
posted by janey47 to Writing & Language (3 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: This?
posted by (alice) at 4:54 PM on May 21, 2013


Best answer: Is it this?
“Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there aren't all that many, the room being always half empty) and then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a barstool, trying to talk to her. Everyone likes Tamina. Because she knows how to listen to people.

But is she really listening? Or is she merely looking at them so attentively, so silently? I don't know, and it's not very important. What matters is that she doesn't interrupt anyone. You know what happens when two people talk. One of them speaks and the other breaks in: "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own "It's absolutely the same with me, I..."

The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others. The whole secret of Tamina's popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She submits to the forces occupying her ear, never saying: "It's absolutely the same with me, I...”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
posted by jeather at 4:55 PM on May 21, 2013 [5 favorites]


I found mine by searching Goodreads quotes using Kundera and conversation and skimming until I found the one that looked right.
posted by jeather at 4:57 PM on May 21, 2013


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