The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

by Milan Kundera

The people of Prague had an inferiority complex with respect to those other cities. Old Town Hall was the only monument of note destroyed in the war, and they decided to leave it in ruins so that no Pole or German could accuse them of having suffered less than their share.

People usually escape from their troubles into the future; they draw an imaginary line across the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles will cease to exist. But Tereza saw no such line in her future. Only looking back could bring her consolation.

Overnight, the country had become nameless. For seven days, Russian troops wandered the countryside, not knowing where they were.

the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn’t know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?

Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did not feel innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by ‘not knowing’, he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.

The people with the first type of reaction would be happy because by inflating cowardice, he would make their actions seem commonplace and thereby give them back their lost honour. The people with the second type of reaction, who had come to consider their honour a special privilege never to be yielded, nurtured a secret love for the cowards, for without them their courage would soon erode into a trivial, monotonous grind admired by no one.

The words ‘Es muss sein!’ had acquired a much more solemn ring; they seemed to issue directly from the lips of Fate. In Kant’s language, even ‘Good morning’, suitably pronounced, can take the shape of a metaphysical thesis, German is a language of heavy words. ‘Es muss sein!’ was no longer a joke; it had become ‘der schwer gefasste Entschluss’ (the difficult or weighty resolution).

Now he understood what made people (people he always pitied) happy when they took a job without feeling the compulsion of an internal ‘Es muss sein!’ and forgot it the moment they left for home every evening.

The ‘Es muss sein!’ of his profession had been like a vampire sucking his blood.

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

The original Russian caption read: ‘Citizen, have you joined the Red Army?’ It was replaced by a Czech text that read: ‘Citizen, have you signed the Two Thousand Words?’

The ‘Two Thousand Words’ was the first glorious manifesto of the 1968 Prague Spring. It called for the radical democratization of the Communist regime.

What were these two trying to make him swallow, reducing his whole life to a single small idea about Oedipus or even less: to a single primitive ‘no!’ in the face of the regime.

No one could be more innocent, in his soul and conscience, than Oedipus. And yet he punished himself when he saw what he had done.’

She, born of six fortuities, she, the blossom sprung from the chief surgeon’s sciatica, she, the reverse side of all his ‘Es muss sein!’ – she was the only thing he cared about.

characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.

History is similar to individual lives in this respect. There is only one history of the Czechs.

Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all.

He longed for a holiday. But for an absolute holiday, a rest from all imperatives, from all ‘Es muss sein!’ If he could take a rest (a permanent rest) from the hospital operating table, then why not from the world operating table,

the famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Young Stalin was therefore both the Son of God (because his father was revered like God) and His cast-off.

If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light.

It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. ‘Kitsch’ is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

The May Day ceremony drew its inspiration from the deep well of the categorical agreement with being. The unwritten, unsung motto of the parade was not ‘Long live Communism!’ but ‘Long live life!’

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.

Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.

Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

Soviet films, which flooded the cinemas of all Communist countries in that cruellest of times, were saturated with incredible innocence and chastity. The greatest conflict that could occur between two Russians was a lovers’ misunderstanding:

A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.

As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

The march on Cambodia had been their idea, and here the Americans, supremely unabashed as usual, had not only taken over, but had taken over in English without a thought that a Dane or a Frenchman might not understand them.

And because the Danes had long since forgotten that they once formed a nation of their own, the French were the only Europeans capable of protest.

When the crimes of the country called the Soviet Union became too scandalous, a leftist had two choices: either to spit on his former life and stop marching or (more or less sheepishly) to reclassify the Soviet Union as an obstacle to the Grand March and march on.

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.

Descartes took a decisive step forward: he made man ‘maître et propriétaire de la nature’. And surely there is a deep connection between that step and the fact that he was also the one who point-blank denied animals a soul. Man is master and proprietor, says Descartes, whereas the beast is merely an automaton, an animated machine, a machina animata.

All faith in Communism and love for Russia was dead. So they sought people who wished to get back at life for something, people with revenge on the brain. Then they had to focus, cultivate, and maintain those people’s aggressiveness, give them a temporary substitute to practise on. The substitute they lit upon was animals.

Only after a year did the accumulated malice (which until then had been vented, for the sake of training, on animals) find its true goal: people. People started being removed from their jobs, arrested, put on trial. At last the animals could breathe freely.

We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions – love, antipathy, charity, or malice – and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.

Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

‘Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it’s a terrific relief to realize you’re free, free of all missions.’