Episode – coincidence – biography….

One of the books that I finished lately is "immortality" by milan kundera. a great piece of reading full of paradoxes that makes you think about the meaning of your life and the meaning of love, immortality etc...

I felt that one particular exerpt - among many others - is very true. It's long but at the same time it's intriguing...

"In Aristotle “Poetics”, the episode is an important concept. Aristotle did not like episodes. According to him, an episode, from the point of view of poetry, is the worst possible type of event. It is not an unavoidable consequence of preceding action, nor cause or what is to follow; it is outside the casual chain of events which is the story. It is merely a sterile accident which can be left out without making the story lose its intelligible continuity, and it is incapable of making a permanent mark upon the life of the characters. You take the metro to meet that woman in your life and a moment before you arrive at your station a girl you don’t know and haven’t noticed before ( after all, you have a date with that woman in your life and are oblivious to everything else) suddenly faint and is about to collapse. Because you are standing right next to her, you catch her and hold her in your arms for a moment until she opened her eyes. You help her sit down in a seat which someone has vacated for her and because at that point the train suddenly slows down, you free yourself from her with an almost impatient movement so that you can getoff and rush after that woman in your life. At that instant the girl whom you held in your arms just a moment earlier is completely forgotten. This event is a typical episode. Life is as stuffed with episodes as a mattress with horsehair, but a poet (according to Aristotle) is not an upholsterer and must remove all stuffing from his story, even though real life consists of nothing but precisely such stuffing.
For Goethe meeting Bettina was an insignificant episode; from a quantitative viewpoint, she took up only a tiny interval of his lifetime, and moreover Goethe tried as hard as he could to prevent her from ever playing a causal role in his life, assiduously keeping her outside his biography. But it is precisely here that we realize the relativity of the concept of the episode, a relativity Aristotle did not think through: for nobody can guarantee that some totally episodic event may not contain whiting itself a power that some day could unexpectedly turn it into a cause of further events. When I say some day, it can even be after death; this was precisely Bettina’s triumph, for she became part of Goethe’s life story when he was no longer alive.
We can this complete Aristotle’s definition of the episode and state: no episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode for ever, for every event, now matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or adventure. Episodes are like landmines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may some day turn into a story that will prove faithful to you. You may be walking down the street and from the opposite direction will come a woman who, while still far away, will look straight into your eyes with a gaze that seem rather crazy to you. As she comes closer, she slows down, stops and says: “is that really you? I’ve been looking for you for such a long time!” And throws her arms around your neck. It is the same girl who fainted and fell into your arms as you were taking the metro to see the woman pf your life, who in the meantime has become your wife and has given you a child. But the girl who encountered you unexpectedly in the street has decided to fall in love with her saviour and to regard your chance meeting as an intimation of fate. She will phone you five times a day, write you letters, visit your wife and keep explaining to her that she loves you and has a right to you until that woman in your life loses her patience, spitefully goes to bed with the refuse collector and then runs away from home, taking the child with her. And in order to escape from the lovesick girl who has in the meantime transferred all the contents of her cupboards into your apartment, you flee across the ocean where you die in hopeless misery. If our lives were endless like the lives of the gods of antiquity, the concept of episode would lose its meaning, for in infinity every event, no matter how trivial, would meet up with its consequence and unfold into a story (...)
Biography: sequence of events which we consider important to our life. However, what is important and what isn’t? because we ourselves don’t know (and never even think of putting such a silly question to ourselves) we accept as important whatever is accepted by others, for example by our employer, whose questionnaire we will fill out: date of birth, parents’ occupation, changes of occupation, domicile, marriages, divorces, births of children, serious diseases. It is deplorable but it is a fact: we have learned to see our lives through the eyes of business or government questionnaires.”"

so - what is important to you?