By Silvia Cassanelli
“Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life.”
Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting explores the paradoxes of memory and erasure, capturing how laughter both conceals and reveals the vulnerability of human experience. Having spent the summer in Prague, a city steeped in history yet fragile in its remembrance, this notion became particularly clear to me. As I walked along the Vltava, amused by couples drifting in boats beneath the bridges, I recognised how easily moments, even those soaked in beauty, slip into the currents of forgetting. How could a place so alive with history feel so exposed to the erosion of memory?
Prague’s charm lies in this very tension – its cobblestone streets and strong Gothic towers standing stubbornly against political upheaval: a defiant reminder of what has endured. Still, like any memory, the city is vulnerable to time. My brief stay there was a fleeting chapter in my life, made more precious by its impermanence. Kundera’s work suggests that memory, in its selectivity and impermanence, both shapes and distorts the past. Laughter accompanies our most treasured moments but it does not stop them from fading.
Life rarely follows a neat chronology in Kundera’s fragmented narratives, just as our memories are never fully intact. What we recall is partial, sometimes morphed, sometimes forgotten. Looking back on my time in Prague, I know I will not remember every detail, but rather a mosaic of fleeting impressions: the shadows cast by the spires, the old-world charm of its knobbly cobblestones, the grandiosity of the castle.
I both laughed and forgot in Prague, but I left it laughing, and probably forgetting, yet somehow feeling that what was lost doesn’t negate what was experienced. Kundera’s paradox endures: forgetting is inevitable, but it does not erase meaning or spirit. Even as my memories of Prague blur, what remains will continue to shape me, quietly persisting, like the city itself.
