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What I Learned About Power from Milan Kundera
Thoughts after a President says, “We love you.”
I wouldn’t say I like writing about love. And I don’t particularly enjoy talking about politics. What I want to do is talk about words. When I turned on the news last night in London, I saw a crowd rushing up the Washington State Capitol stairs. Not long after, the President spoke to his followers on Twitter:
We love you. You are very special.
At that moment, my memory hurtled me back to a different time. I was twenty years old and living in Prague.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Prague is where I hung out for a few months in the 1990s. I read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being on a top bunk in a backpacker hostel.
When I dropped out of university, I drifted around Eastern Europe to work out what I wanted to do next. Stuffed in my backpack were two well-worn novels (books in English were hard to find) and a pocketbook of phrases.
There was no Twitter or phone. You felt the freedom in the distances, language, communication, and when you exchanged hard cash for cash.
In the middle of the 1990s, Eastern Europe was still blinking itself awake from Communism. It had only been a…
