Today on the homepage, I have an Impromptus column, full of “hot button” subjects: relating to politics, sexuality, and other such things. Any “cool button” subjects? Well, there’s sports and there’s language, but those subjects can be pretty hot, too. Anyway, try it out.
In a column last week, I had a note on Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, who has just passed away. A reader of ours writes,
Dear Mr. Nordlinger,
Milan Kundera has joined the immortals who could and should have received the Nobel Prize in Literature but — scandalously — did not . . .
Kundera was an extraordinary literary artist and innovator, and he was not just a dissenter from the totalitarian cruelty of Communism.
What actually changed my life and confirmed my rejection of “progressivism” was the insight of his character Tamina in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, for whom the reality of life under Communism, as miserable as it was, was yet endurable, whereas the purported ideals of Communism — universal human brotherhood and an end to human conflict — were actually much worse. They were worse because they reduced everyone to children, and — as he further elaborated in The Unbearable Lightness of Being — they were not serious but kitsch.
Now all but two of my heroes — the ones who were great during the span of my own more or less mature lifetime — are dead. Shostakovich, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Bellow, García Márquez (an awful man but a great novelist), Miłosz, Singer, Reagan, Kundera. Who’s left? For me, just Alfred Brendel and Clarence Thomas.
Recently, some readers and I were talking about style, and a reader described a ping-pong player’s move as “nonchalant.” He further said, “What a lovely word that is, by the way.”
Someone else now writes,
I agree that “nonchalant” is a wonderful word. It sounds just like what it means, just as “Brigitte Bardot” sounds like a sexy woman.
Ha, so true.
Finally, a reader says,
Howdy, Jay,
As you know, sportsmanship, grace, and dignity are in short supply these days. Especially when it comes to politics and, well, sports. But, at Wimbledon, Novak Djokovic managed it nicely. Have a look.
Thanks to one and all, and talk to you soon.