Dreaming of a Slowness

“...The claim of the loss of collective memory in modernity, which happens with the advent of mass culture and the ‘acceleration of history’...” - Dmitri Nikulin (19??)

I risk taking off on another tangent altogether, but this sentence has tied up with my recent thoughts so well that I just have to share.

In the last book I read, "Slowness" by Milan Kundera, there's a passage that reads:

The way contemporary history is told is like a huge concert where they present all of Beethoven's one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each. If the same concert were given again in ten years, only the first note of each piece would be played, thus one hundred thirty-eight notes for the whole concert, presented as one continuous melody. And in twenty years, the whole of Beethoven's music would be summed up in a single very long buzzing tone, like the endless sound he heard on the first day of his deafness.

The passage finds itself expanding on the nature of the memory (and thenceforth history) of a certain character in the book. What strikes me about this passage, which is in Kundera’s signature disconnected poetic style, is that I don’t know if I agree with it or not.

We are told to believe that our memories are endless and that we remember, on some level or the other, everything we have experienced. Why then, can't whatever history is made be remembered in its whole by the collective memory? History can get bigger and bigger, richer and richer, instead of the other way around… One may argue that Kundera is talking about how history is told rather than remembered. Still, isn't the telling, and subsequently the hearing, of a history the best way to keep it alive? When I'm thinking with this sort of rationale, I want to believe that Kundera is wrong.

But somewhere, I know that as a child of post-liberation India, I have been less and less in touch with the history of my own land and culture and more and more lost within the maze of the by-products of western ideals. By this I mean that I enjoy the benefits of western struggles and revolutions (modern technology in particular) without knowing what they actually stood for (did my people ever have a modernist period like the west did?). And all the while, I’m hearing snippets of twenty different stories from around the world everyday. I’m living in twenty different histories and my days are speeding on ahead. Even if our memories are endless, life isn’t. Even if the symphonies aren't shortened, I fear that they are played so fast for me that I can't discern them. And that, my friends, is a scary thought.