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Here Was One
No. 8
Grant Hodges
July 30, 2023
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Dear Reader,
Milan Kundera (1929-2023) died earlier this month. Kundera was a Czech-French writer who had lived in exile in France since 1975, after running afoul of the authoritarian Communist regime that governed Czechoslovakia at the time. He wrote ten novels, as well as numerous plays, short stories, poems, and essays. Until his death, he was considered a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In his 1988 collection of critical essays—The Art of the Novel—Kundera described the novel as “a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.” And this week’s piece comes from his ground-breaking 1984 book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
From The Unbearable Lightness of Being
By Milan Kundera
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?
Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing….
[But] the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine….
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).
If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. 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.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Background
The Unbearable Lightness of Being follows the lives of Tomáš, a Czech surgeon; his wife, Tereza; his mistress, Sabina; and Sabina’s lover, Franz. The novel takes place throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and the 1968 Prague Spring and subsequent Soviet invasion feature prominently, displacing the characters and ultimately forcing Tomáš and Tereza to flee to the countryside, where Tomáš works as a truck driver and Tereza as a cowherd.
The central dilemma in the novel—as referenced above—involves the concept of Eternal Recurrence, popularized by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and the related question of how seriously or trivially (i.e., heavy or light) we should consider our lives. Each of the four main characters struggles with this question through trials large and small—from the death of a dog, to the infidelity of a spouse, to the crushing invasion of an authoritarian regime.
What It Offers
I love this novel—and Kundera’s writings more generally—because, as suggested in the excerpt from The Art of the Novel above, he is completely unafraid to confront weighty, philosophical questions directly through the insights and actions of his characters. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the narrator (possibly Kundera himself) even breaks the proverbial fourth wall several times, acknowledging the fact that the characters are his own fictive creations, and that he is subjecting them to challenges and difficulties with the purpose of complicating the heaviness/lightness dichotomy.
Without giving too much away, I think it’s fair to say that none of the characters find themselves able to bear either total heaviness or total lightness (as the title indicates), but even Kundera seems to lose interest in the unanswerable question, choosing instead to focus on the love and beauty that animate and sustain their lives.
Notably, the book closes with a beautiful scene, where Tomáš and Tereza—essentially living in exile in the country, their lives and careers completely upended, having battled through betrayals slight and serious, no longer young—find themselves reconciled, dancing in a basement bar:
On they danced to the strains of the piano and violin. Tereza leaned her head on Tomáš’s shoulder. Just as she had when they flew together in the airplane through the storm clouds. She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
*****
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
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