My friends, and my enemies (for if I am asking nothing, I may as well address them too, since change being inevitable, both my friends and enemies may well change places), I float on in a current of shifting winds, buoying me up, heaving me down, pushing me this way, and then that way, and I wonder at it all. I try to live in time, knowing its sole purpose is changing me into what I am not now, and that its mercy is also its cruelty.
To be master of your fate is to choose your wind and direction, knowing the fickleness of the first, and lacking a fully reliable compass to be sustained in the latter. You can be master of nothing else. This is Life.
A quote from this excellent volume:
The first step in liquidating a people, said Hubl, is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.
And Kundera then asks: “. . .is it true that a nation cannot cross a desert of organized forgetting?”
From Part 6, The Angels, page 159 in my edition. These comments follow other similar and relevant passages.