Sunday
Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things (a Moscow-trained Marxist believing in horoscopes), make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil's domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness).
The first time an angel heard the devil's laughter, he was dumbfounded. That happened at a feast in a crowded room, where the devil's laughter, which is terribly contagious, spread from one person to another. The angel clearly understood that such laughter was directed against God and against the dignity of his works. He knew that he must react swiftly somehow, but felt weak and defenseless. Unable to come up with anything of his own, he aped his adversary. Opening his mouth, he emitted broken, spasmodic sounds in the higher reaches of his vocal range (a bit like the sound made on the street of a seaside town by Michelle and Gabrielle), but giving them an opposite meaning: whereas the devil's laughter denoted the absurdity of things, the angel on the contrary meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good, and meaningful everything here below was.
-- Milan Kundera "The Book of Laugher and Forgetting"
From Meg Pokrass
September 6, 2009 at 11:13 am
i agree with you and love this insight. I find the writer Julie Hecht to employ the same kind of micro-magic. I can’t get enough of the parts where she talks about tiny details, the kind of details that compose our days — that are supposedly uninteresting.
I’m also thinking of the series Seinfeld — in his own way (on a much larger scale) this was its brilliance.
From Randall Brown
September 8, 2009 at 7:36 am
Yes, Meg: Seinfeld! Micro-Magic. I like the sound of that.