The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

by Milan Kundera

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.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the non-existence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.

In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. This is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).

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.

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

How many ancient myths begin with the rescue of an abandoned child!

Karna, Kabir

metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

In languages that derive from Latin, ‘compassion’ means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, ‘pity’ (French, pitié; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer.

the word ‘compassion’ generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.

In languages that form the word ‘compassion’ not from the root ‘suffering’ but from the root ‘feeling’, the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult.

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person. That is why Tomas accepted Tereza’s wish to emigrate as the culprit accepts his sentence,

The realization that he was utterly powerless was like the blow of a sledgehammer, yet it was curiously calming as well.

his melancholy growing more and more beautiful. He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.

New adventures hid around each corner. The future was again a secret.

Suddenly his step was much lighter. He soared. He had entered Parmenides’ magic field: he was enjoying the sweet lightness of being.

During those two beautiful days of melancholy, his compassion (that curse of emotional telepathy) had taken a holiday. It had slept the sound Sunday sleep of a miner who, after a hard week’s work, needs to gather strength for his Monday shift.

there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone,

The weighty resolution is at one with the voice of Fate (‘Es muss sein!’); necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value. This is a conviction born of Beethoven’s music,

we believe that the greatness of man stems from the fact that he bears his fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders.

Apart from her consummated love for Tomas, there was in the realm of possibility, an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men.

the soul is nothing more than the grey matter of the brain in action. The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice.

Staring at herself for long stretches of time, she was occasionally upset at the sight of her mother’s features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone.

If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.

Necessity knows no magic formulae – they are all left to chance.

Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences.

Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life.

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence.

Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect some day to suffer vertigo.

What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

The news transformed into rebellion Tereza’s despair at Tomas’s infidelities.

‘Pick me up’, is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, patiently.

If nothing was to remain of Dubček, then at least those awful long pauses when he seemed unable to breathe, when he gasped for air before a whole nation glued to its radios, at least those pauses would remain. Those pauses contained all the horror that had befallen their country.

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

No, it was not superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression and imbued her with a new will to live. The birds of fortuity had alighted once more on her shoulders.

He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends.

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina’s distaste for all extremism.

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.

For Franz, living in truth meant breaking down the barriers between the private and the public. He was fond of quoting André Breton on the desirability of living ‘in a glass house’ into which everyone can look and there are no secrets.

instead of being Sabina, she would have to act the role of Sabina, decide how best to act the role. Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.

When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina – what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

The Montparnasse Cemetery was the closest. It was all tiny houses, miniature chapels over each grave. Sabina could not understand why the dead would want to have imitation palaces built over them. The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life.

the musical composition of her life had scarcely been outlined; she was grateful to Franz for the motifs he gave her to insert.