Because Milan Kundera Does It Better: "The Hitchhiking Game"

From Milan Kundera’s short story “The Hitchhiking Game,” in that book I’m reading right now. A crazy creepy sad love story – you know it will end badly because he doesn’t bother to name his characters. Remember that movie “Closer” with the most menacing Clive Owen, sexual Julia Roberts, spineless Jude Law and saddest Natalie Portman you’ve ever seen? The story is kind of like that. I recommend it, but not if you’re in a relationship.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt like this:

“She always blushed in advance at the idea that she was going to blush. She longed to feel free and easy about her body, the way most of the women around her did. She had even invented a special course in self-persuasion: she would repeat to herself that at birth every human being received on out of millions of available bodies, as one would receive an allotted room out of millions of rooms in an enormous hotel; that consequently the body was fortuitous and impersonal, only a ready-made, borrowed thing. She would repeat this to herself in different ways, but she could never manage to feel it. This mind-body dualism was alien to her. She was too much at one with her body; that is why she always felt such anxiety about it.

Rene Magritte The Rape, 1934

“She experienced this same anxiety even in her relations with the young man, whom she had known for a year and with whom she was happy, perhaps because he never separated her body from her soul, and she could live with him wholly. In this unity there was happiness, but it is not far from happiness to suspicion, and the girl was full of suspicions…She wanted him to be completely hers and herself to be completely his, but it often seemed to her that the more she tried to give him everything, the more she denied him something: the very thing that a light and superficial love or a flirtation gives a person. It worried her that she was not able to combine seriousness with lightheartedness.”

Rene Magritte The Lovers, 1928