Unbearable Lightness, Rene Girard, 12 Best Films of 2021 and At Peace

6 min readJan 22, 2022

Ruggets #7

Hello again, thanks God it is another weekend. I wonder how many of these weekends I have left. Let’s not overwhelm ourselves with bad thoughts, shall we ? We only know one thing, life goes on.

Welcome to another edition of good nuggets from all over the internet. As always, the aim of this kind of posts in this newsletter is to inform you about what you might have missed while you were watching cute cat videos on Instagram. Or maybe you hit the video on Youtube where Arif scores a historical goal against Manchester United. I am here to help the money you spent on the Internet worth it.

1 BOOK

Today’s book is a novel. Most of my close friends will be shocked when they see me suggesting a novel book but sometimes you have to surprise right. Do not get me wrong, I adore the high quality book from all genre, but let’s be honest most novels from modern times are empty (could not find a lighter word for the feelings).

The book is written by Milan Kundera, one of those geniuses who leave you with some scar on your body while you are trying to understand what love and life is in high school or university.

There are excellent quotes from the book. I will leave the best 5 here so that you are intrigued enough to buy the book.

We demand love to show love:

Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company

We never know what to do with our life:

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

Our brain obeys the rule of our heart:

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

The heavier the burden we carry, the closer the fulfillment of life:

The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Change is so hard, we love our static inertia:

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.

2 ARTICLES

Today’s articles are the ones that I kept coming back to, thanks to my beloved app Pocket.

Here is a gentle introduction to Rene Girard and his provoking idea of “memetic desire”. In short, we want things just because someone else wants it. I think I hear you say this idea belongs to Aristotle. Exactamo. Aristotle said it best when he said:

For imitation is natural to man from his infancy. Man differs from other animals particularly in this, that he is imitative, and acquires his rudiments of knowledge in this way; besides, the delight in it is universal.

Mimetic desire: We make many of our choices according to the desiresof others, families, friends, partners — our models. We naturally do not want a Tesla, until we see a lot of friends buy and post a picture on Instagram. We value things based on how much value others put on them.
The value of objects is not objective — it’s subjective. And that subjective value is determined mimetically, based on our relationships with others. We could say that value is intersubjective: We assign value to things (and therefore desire them) according to what other people want. The implications of this social process of desire that Girard put his finger on six decades ago is something that behavioral economists and scientists are only beginning to understand.

Here is a list of advice from all over the world about being a good couple. As a married person, there are a lot of lessons for me and multiple times I nodded while I was reading since the advice fits perfectly with my experience.

Share the emotions you partner feels. Sad, happy, depressed, hopeless whatever. You are there to show he/she is not alone in the fight against the existence. Elevate and be elevated by him/her.
You would like to have peace and inner silence while you keep going on with your life. Try not to win every discussion or disagreement, sometimes lose on purpose. Marriage is not a battle it is an ongoing transformation of selves.
No matter what, no matter how hard you feel broken by your partner do not get into the same bed with hatred. Take deep breaths, solve the problem and move on. The problems you are not solving will become insurmountable walls in the near future.

1 VIDEO

2021 was a yet another strange year for all of us. We spent time mostly at hour home while getting injected one Pfizer after one Pfizer. There were a lot of good movies that came out in 2021.

Here is a list of films which will worth every second you spare for them. I beg you to start watching from Nobody and dm me about your thoughts on the film. This film is right behind Leon for me from now on.

Give me the goddamn kitty-cat bracelet!’ — Hutch Mansell (Nobody)

2 QUOTES

Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboat. — Voltaire
Half doing something is an expensive way of not doing it — Angela Jiang

AT PEACE 
Very near my sunset, I bless you, Life 
because you never gave me neither unfilled hope 
nor unfair work, nor undeserved sorrow. Because I see at the end of my rough way 
that I was the architect of my own destiny 
and if I extracted the sweetness or the bitterness of things 
it was because I put the sweetness or the bitterness in them 
when I planted rose bushes I always harvested roses Certainly, winter is going to follow my youth 
But you didn't tell me that May was eternal 
I found without a doubt long my nights of pain 
But you didn't promise me only good nights 
And in exchange I had some peaceful ones 
I loved, I was loved, the sun caressed my face 
Life, you owe me nothing, 
Life, we are at peace!--Amado Nervo