The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978)
Milan Kundera

     And then suddenly they were all singing the three or four simple notes again, speeding up the steps of their dance, fleeing rest and sleep, outstripping time, and filling their innocence with strength.  Everyone was smiling, and Eluard leaned down to a girl he had his arm around and said,

A man possessed by peace never stops smiling.

And she laughed and stamped the ground a little harder and rose a few inches above the pavement, pulling the others along with her, and before long not one of them was touching the ground, they were taking two steps in place and one step forward without touching the ground, yes, they were rising up over Wenceslaus Square, their ring the very image of a giant wreath taking flight, and I ran off after them down on the ground, I kept looking up at them, and they floated on, lifting first one leg, then the other, and down below--Prague with its cafes full of poets and its jails full of traitors, and in the crematorium they were just finishing off one Socialist representative and one surrealist, and the smoke climbed to the heavens like a good omen, and I heard Eluard’s metallic voice intoning,

Love is at work it is tireless,

and I ran after that voice through the streets in hope of keeping up with that wonderful wreath of bodies rising above the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.

[Milan Kundera.  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.  Trans., Michael Henry Heim.  New York: Knopf, 1980.]