There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

Kundera’s remark separates chronological age from lived, inner time. Much of consciousness, he suggests, does not continuously “feel” its years; it moves in a present tense shaped by desire, habit, memory, and attention. Age becomes salient mainly in punctuating events—illness, loss, sudden comparison with the young, or moments when the body or society reminds us of a number. The quote also implies a tension between the self as an enduring, ageless subject and the self as an object measured by calendars and biographies. In Kundera’s broader concerns, this points to how identity is narrated: we are not simply our timeline, and the deepest part of the self resists being reduced to dates.