The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful… Their love story did not begin until afterwards: she fell ill and he was unable to send her home as he had the others. Kneeling by her as she lay sleeping in his bed, he realized that someone had sent her downstream in a bulrush basket. I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I don’t like Kundera’s novels — I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being a few years ago and Ignorance just now, and these novels feel incomplete, unresolved — but there’s something about the poetry of his words that captivates the romantic part of my imagination. We have these poignant little moments in life, and this is what Kundera captures so well.
I went to see a new dentist earlier this week, and you forget this when you’ve had the same dentist for years, but a new dentist needs to diagnose what’s happening with your teeth all over again, so he takes your x-rays and tell you all these things you already know about yourself. That you had braces; twice, in fact, because your parents didn’t realize that having braces in elementary school was unwise. That you had your wisdom teeth taken out (three wisdom teeth; not two, not four, but three). That you still have a baby tooth — and this one you have to explain; you were born with an extra tooth on one side and one missing on the other, so they removed the extra adult tooth and pulled the one above it down with a gold chain, and the baby tooth never got pushed out and remains in your mouth to this day. It’s going to fall out soon, he says. Not tomorrow, but soon.
And suddenly, you are aware of your adulthood — not because you have a baby tooth, or because that baby tooth will someday soon fall out and you’ll either need an implant or have a missing-tooth smile for the rest of your life, but because you are the only soul in the world who knows about this baby tooth, and all at once it hits you, what it means to be alone.
That’s a Kundera moment.