present is not precedent.

I'm reading Milan Kundera's "Ignorance," about a Czech woman who emigrated to France to escape Communist occupation. Milan Kundera is always an engaging blend of history, philosophy and storytelling. This (timely) selection, in which she seeks to express how hopeless her situation feels to her people, is no exception. Read on; comments follow below.

"Irena would quote a stanza from Jan Skacel, a Czech poet of the period: he describes the sadness surrounding him; he wants to take that sadness in his hands, carry it far off somewhere and build himself a house out of it, he wants to lock himself inside that house for three hundred years and for three hundred years not open the door, not open the door to anyone!

Three hundred years? Skacel wrote those lines in the 1970s and he died in 1989, just a few days before those three hundred years of sadness he saw stretching ahead crumbled... .

Did Skacel have it wrong when he spoke of 300 years? Of course he did. All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind. But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment. During what I call their first 20-year span (1918-1938), the Czechs believed that their republic had all infinity ahead of it. They had it wrong, but precisely because they were wrong, they lived those years in a state of joy that led their arts to flourish as never before.

After the Russian invasion, since they had no inkling of Communism's eventual end, they again believed they were inhabiting an infinity, and it was not the pain of their current life but the vacuity of the future that sucked dry their energies, stifled their courage, and made that third 20-year span so craven, so wretched.

In 1921, convinced that with his 12-tone system he had opened far-reaching prospects to musical history, Arnold Schoenberg declared that thanks to him, predominance (he didn't say 'glory,' he said Vorherrschaft, 'predominance') was guaranteed to German music (he, a Viennese, didn't say 'Austrian,' he said 'German') for the next hundred years (I quote him exactly, he spoke of 'a hundred years'). A dozen years after that prophecy, in 1933, he was forced, as a Jew, to leave Germany (the very Germany for which he sought to guarantee Vorherrschaft), as was all his music based on his 12-tone system (which was condemned as incomprehensible, elitist, cosmopolitan, and hostile to the German spirit).

Schoenberg's prognosis, however mistaken, is nonetheless indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the meaning of his work, which he considered not destructive, hermetic, cosmopolitan, individualistic, difficult, or abstract but, rather, deeply rooted in 'German soil' (yes, he spoke of 'German soil'); Schoenberg believed he was writing not a fascinating epilogue to the history of Europe's great music (which is how I tend to see his work) but the prologue to a glorious future stretching farther than the eye could see."

It seems human nature to believe the way things are now is the way they will always be. Often in despair, more despair is all we can imagine. When we're on top of the world, nothing could bring us down. That present-moment experience of despair or joy, as Kundera alludes, is magnified by our perceived promise that our present predicts more-of-the-same.

Most of the time, 300 years of sadness runs out early. Or the glorious future stretching infinitely ahead is suddenly curtailed. Whether the surprise is from bad to good or good to bad, we never, ever know what today will be until we get there. Nothing is promised. Nor is anything doomed.

Yet it's difficult for human beings to live without the context of the past or the future. Today we remember - or repeatedly replay - what has been. Today we worry about tomorrow. We hope to be happy. Nobody easily turns that off, "and nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world."

Stephen Dunn likes to believe that at his eulogy he'll have been able to say, "The truth is, I learned to live without hope as well as I could, almost happily, in the despoiled and radiant now." Some might assign positive value to that lesson, some negative. (Personally I avoid assigning value unless it's real obvious, and here I don't think it is.)

But I'll venture at least that a "now" without hope (said differently, without attachment to the future) might result in less suffering, whether it's experienced in the context of gain or loss. If today is joyful, I'm going to live it for all it's worth, because I don't own tomorrow; I have little say in what it will bring. If today is sad, I'll sit with that sadness because today it is my house-guest... but I won't despair as though it's a permanently-settled-in couch surfer. :)

"The Guest House" (selection)
Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all.
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.