For many centuries, just like today, young men have been riding forth in Moravian villages with strange messages in some unknown language that they pronounce with a touching loyalty without understanding it. Some long-dead people certainly had something important to say, and today they are reborn in their descendants like deaf-and-dumb orators speaking to the audience in beautiful and incomprehensible gestures. Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense. Thousands of deaf-and-dumb Rides of Kings will set out with their piteous and incomprehensible messages, and no one will have the time to hear them out.
—Milan Kundera (translated by Michael Henry Heim)
—found in The Joke (1967; this translation 1992)