"Milan Kundera, from his latest collection of essays, Encounters, in Part VIII, page 145 in the paperback edition Harper Perennial:  "Knowing the cost of the imagination, I feel above all a humble admiration for Fellini's films."

Yes, I do too.  I have for some time had one of my obsessions with La Dolce Vita and Otto e Mezzo, in no small part do to the director's choice of Mastroianni perhaps, even back as far as when I was stuck in  Margaritaville, a horrible period displaying my lack of career.  It was soothing for me to see the dream-like suspension of protagonist-worthy people going through their life's travels.  My mind's eye was far away from Washington, DC's business.  Maybe I needed the presence of other dreamers (and the drinkers, the escapers, the con artists that come along with them as some sort of example perhaps) to make sense of life, to make sense of the daily flow.  (They had me at one point doing this terribly long haul from Friday night closing to Saturday brunch, home exhausted, then back for Sunday night, then Monday day.)

Is there a touch of Dostoyevsky in Kundera's sensibilities?  Or is that sense of that possible similarity colored by the fact of exile related to a Russian state.  Both are writers, writers of a very serious nature, yes, capable of play and jokes, but of a deep sense of human reality, contrasting the art and the dreams of the imagination with the colder realities of state and prevailing public thought.  Alyosha Karamazov might not seem too far out of place in a Kundera, at least if you translate the Grand Inquisitor into the later half of the 20th Century;  a Kundera character might make an effective narration in Notes from the House of the Dead, an attendant before and after.  Is that the condition of history repeating itself, I wonder.

Here in our part of the world we endure our exile from the soul and art and the presence of the spiritual in our lives through the extended hopes and offers of material things, shopping.  But these hopes too are being worn quite thin, no promise of any security or ability to save enough for anything resembling retirement.

Kundera's comment, above, is prompted by "a dinner in Paris more than twenty years ago:  a pleasant young man is talking of Fellini with an amused mocking scorn."  We've all heard it, I think, anyway, that scorn, that lack of a willingness to be attentive to something outside the 'normal and practical realms of life.'  A dismissive flat 'oh.'  Or an, 'okay... you go do that...'  A failure of recognition, of realization, as the case of the good-sized body of art Milan Kundera points out for us in any of his essay collections and in many instances in his novels, things we might initially sense are for a better critical mind than our own but quickly come to grasp.  That's Kundera for you, and maybe not so unlike Dostoyevsky before him.

     In the presence of this clever young fellow...  I experienced for the first time a sensation I never felt in Czechoslovakia, even in the worst Stalinist years:  the sense that we have come to the era of post-art, in a world where art is dying because the need for art, the sensitivity and the love for it, is dying.

This is, of course, saddening.  This is, of course, a cause of concern, though there's not a lot that can be done about it beyond, for the moment anyway, the realization of this sense, as seen around us.

Who knows.  What can one say?  Well, I tried to bring the Shakespearean into play in my own "remembered novel," my story of college kids stuck in some sort of sweetness that does not allow for them to connect further, but perhaps my skills weren't up for the task, as my eye was drawn away by attending to other unsatisfactory business that leaves me in my own sort of exile, or by the dreary condition provoked by that same lack of satisfactory connection or disconnection (the closure we all would like to have.)  Which strikes me now as an interesting point to make, one that may not have occurred to me, as the DNA of such a situation were perpetuating itself in my own life.  The Kirkus review found the book's set up, though promising (in the hands of someone competent), to be undermined by flat dialog, repetition, clichéd sentiment, meandering plot.  I wonder, though, if such a review comes, itself, from a source of this death of art before the blank hungry face of widget commerce, this source of marketing's wisdom and wonder, this dictation of popular tastes and what might work for that.  Yes, marketing, an arms race, a competition to get to what sells, to know what sells, even to make exactly what sells...

Is art something to be marketed along with the rest of stuff?  Or did, at least at one era in time and history, simply make movies that were art, and write books that too were art, in need of art, loving art, showing us, perhaps as they fade, what might happen to us without art.

Kundera's sense--he has said it before, in The Curtain, Le Rideau--is that the novel is dying under an avalanche of the banal, of everyone now writing a book.  That I am still figuring over and turning over in my mind, even as I understand it to be quite true.

"The cost of the imagination," yes, this is something true and operating in the world we know.  That, to me, even is the principle plot line (or through line as they call it?) interestingly enough.  And where in one part of the world they might send you away, one way or another, or 'discourage you' authoritatively, in another part of the world that squelching down of the habit is an accepted standard of daily life, a discouraging of any sort of 'weirdness,' any sort of being a real person of feeling, flesh, emotion and blood and imagination.

In the great attempts to produce equality in the market economy, either through 'democracy' or through 'communism,' either through 'secular' state or 'non-secular' state, it seems we are still forgetting something, still continuing to lop the heads off of something new and original and provocative... sensitive.

In my own artistic confinement to the solitary, occasionally broken by something outside of a restaurant, there's something noticed one might, in America, having never seen it quite directly, associate with the Soviet, if that is anyway near the right term.  In the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts there are acres of red carpet and grand chandeliers hanging above, people dressed to see and be seen.  This is where art is found, apparently, by all indications.  But it ever seems to cater to that which is safe, that which is already considered art, going back a ways.  There is some authoritative hand hanging over such places. Now, that is only a small part, this suspicion, of my experience, largely of delight of being taken for something cultural when I go to the Kennedy Center.  But, it is a voice inside my head all along, telling me, as I know, that there is, indeed, "a cost of the imagination."

Yes, there is a cost, and perhaps the sooner you know and realize it, the better off you will be, not getting as down as you would with a different expectation, not getting bent out of shape at the sorts of work you must do to stay alive.  Maybe you know what to look out for, say that some American artists tend to become alcoholic, or that a French artist can never be getting his due until after his death, or the tradition of prison and exile in, say, Russia.  And perhaps this sense of cost reverberates in the excellent stories of Andrei Platonov, Among Animals and Plants, The Potudan River, that seem to echo with a minimizing of ego as a through line, perhaps attributable to the harshness of the Soviet human condition, observant of the difficulty inherent in loving another.

Those who make art need it to sustain themselves.  And they know that the cost of the imagination, of being able to create, comes hand in hand with the realization that life isn't about easy happiness.