But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all t… - Milan Kundera

He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.

Leroy's reasoning is dry as a razor, and Chantal agrees: love as an exaltation of two individuals, love as fidelity, passionate attachment to a single person - no, that doesn't exist. And if it does exist, it is only as self-punishment, willful blindness, escape into a monastery. She tells herself that even if it does exist, love ought not to exist, and the idea does not maker her bitter, on the contrary, it produces a bliss that spreads throughout her body. She thinks of the metaphor of the rose that moves through all men and tells herself that she has been living locked away by love and now she is ready to obey the myth of the rose and merge with its giddy fragrance.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting