“Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two
categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in
all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of
the objective female world.
The obsession of the former is lyrical: what they seek in women is
themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by definition something that can
never be found, they are disappointed again and again. The disappointment that
propels them from woman to woman gives their inconstancy a kind of romantic
excuse, so that many sentimental women are touched by their unbridled
philandering.
The obsession of the latter is epic,
and women see nothing the least bit touching in it: the man projects no
subjective ideal on women, and since everything interests him, nothing can
disappoint him. This inability to be disappointed has something scandalous
about it. The obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in
redemption (redemption by disappointment).
Because the lyrical womanizer always
runs after the same type of woman, we even fail to notice when he exchanges one
mistress for another. His friends perpetually cause misunderstandings by mixing
up his lovers and calling them by the same name.
In pursuit of knowledge, epic
womanizers (and of course Tomas belonged in their ranks) turn away from
conventional feminine beauty, of which they quickly tire, and inevitably end up
as curiosity collectors. They are aware of this and a little ashamed of it, and
to avoid causing their friends embarrassment, they refrain from appearing in
public with their mistresses. ...
Of each erotic experience his
memory recorded only the steep and narrow path of sexual conquest: the first
piece of verbal aggression, the first touch, the first obscenity he said to her
and she to him, the minor perversions he could make her acquiesce in and the
ones she held out against. All else he excluded (almost pedantically) from his
memory. He even forgot where he had first seen one or another woman, if that
event occurred before his sexual offensive began.
The young woman smiled dreamily as
she went on about the storm, and he looked at her in amazement and something
akin to shame: she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to
experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the
evening storm sharply delimit love and nonlove.
By the word nonlove I do not wish to
imply that he took a cynical attitude to the young woman, that, as present-day
parlance has it, he looked upon her as a sex object; on the contrary, he was
quite fond of her, valued her character and intelligence, and was willing to
come to her aid if ever she needed him. He was not the one who behaved
shamefully towards her; it was his memory, for it was his memory that,
unbeknown to him, had excluded her from the sphere of love.
The brain appears to possess a
special area which we might call poetic
memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes
our lives beautiful. ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love
begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
