To see how the world is seen and noted by some people. In this case Kundera, commenting on Central Europe. The economy of a poet, in very few words a portrait, a sensibility, sharing his deep grasp of an intensely lived history.
"Central Europe: Seventeenth century: The immense power of the Baroque gave a central unity to this multinational region without a clear center, with moving and indefinable borders. The lingering shadow of Baroque Catholicism extended into the eighteenth century: no Voltaire, no Fielding. In the hierarchy of the arts, it was music that rose to the top. Since Haydn (and until Schoenberg and Bartok), this was the gravitational center for European music. Nineteenth century: some master poets, but no Flaubert; Biedermier: the veil of the idyll thrown over the real. In the twentieth century: revolt. The great minds (Freud, the novelists) revalorized what had been unknown, misunderstood, for centuries: rational, demystifying lucidity; the meaning of the real; the novel. Their revolt was exactly the opposite of French modernism -- it was antirational, antirelaist, lyrical. (This would cause many misunderstandings.) The Mount Rushmore of the greatest Central European novelists includes Kafka, Hasek, Musil, Broch, and Gombrowicz, who are united in their aversion to Romanticism; their love for the pre-Balzacian novel and for the libertine spirit (Broch interpreted kitsch as a conspiracy of monogamous Puritans against the Enlightenment); their disregard for History and their exaltation of the future; and their modernism that lay outside the illusions of the avant-garde.
The destruction of the empire followed by the cultural marginalization of Austria and the polictical nonexistence of its other countries after 1945 made Central Europe into a premonition, a mirror held up to the possible destiny of Europe, the laboratory of the crepuscule."
Aspiration: to learn, to be able to deeply see and grasp and then in measured words like a poet's lay out the world or like the holographic principle, the surface of the world.
