The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true, that nothing is sincere. Maintaining nonbelief (constantly, systematically, without the slightest vacillation) requires a tremendous effort and the proper training—in other words, frequent police interrogations. Tomas lacked that training.

an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie. The “Tell the truth!” imperative drummed into us by our mamas and papas functions so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman during an interrogation. It is simpler for us to argue with him or insult him (which makes no sense whatever) than to lie to his face (which is the only thing to do).

Humiliating public statements are associated exclusively with the signatories’ rise, not fall.

Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement to revolt.

There was no room for her in his poetic memory. There was room for her only on the rug.

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.

Handing him a pen, his son added, “Some ideas have the force of a bomb exploding.”

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.

“Your refusal to compromise. Your clear-cut sense of what’s good and what’s evil, something we’re beginning to lose. We have no idea anymore what it means to feel guilty. The Communists have the excuse that Stalin misled them. Murderers have the excuse that their mothers didn’t love them. And suddenly you come out and say: there is no excuse. 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.”

“But it’s all a misunderstanding! The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy. I wasn’t out to punish anyone, either. Punishing people who don’t know what they’ve done is barbaric. The myth of Oedipus is a beautiful one, but treating it like this . . .”

“It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground.” he said, “than to send petitions to a president.”

Why hadn’t he signed? He could no longer quite remember what had prompted his decision.

As I have pointed out before, 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

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them.

The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

Another way of formulating the question is, Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?

And again he thought the thought we already know: 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.

In 1618, the Czech estates took courage and vented their ire on the emperor reigning in Vienna by pitching two of his high officials out of a window in the Prague Castle. Their defiance led to the Thirty Years War, which in turn led to the almost complete destruction of the Czech nation. Should the Czechs have shown more caution than courage? The answer may seem simple; it is not. Three hundred and twenty years later, after the Munich Conference of 1938, the entire world decided to sacrifice the Czechs’ country to Hitler. Should the Czechs have tried to stand up to a power eight times their size? In contrast to 1618, they opted for caution. Their capitulation led to the Second World War, which in turn led to the forfeit of their nation’s freedom for many decades or even centuries. Should they have shown more courage than caution? What should they have done?

Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.

What he really wanted to say was “There’s nothing to be ashamed of! It’s perfectly normal for our paths not to cross. There’s nothing to get upset about! I’m glad to see you!” But he was afraid to say it, because everything he had said so far failed to come out as intended, and these sincere words, too, would sound sarcastic to his colleague.

If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom.

I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image—and God has intestines!—or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.

Thus, immediately after his introduction to disgust, he was introduced to excitement. Without shit (in both the literal and figurative senses of the word), there would be no sexual love as we know it, accompanied by pounding heart and blinded senses.

Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.

kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.

Tereza’s dream reveals the true function of kitsch: kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions.

The less her life resembled that sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic,

Sabina’s path of betrayals would then continue elsewhere, and from the depths of her being, a silly mawkish song about two shining windows and the happy family living behind them would occasionally make its way into the unbearable lightness of being.

The identity of kitsch comes not from a political strategy but from images, metaphors, and vocabulary. It is therefore possible to break the habit and march against the interests of a Communist country. What is impossible, however, is to substitute one word for others. It is possible to threaten the Vietnamese army with one’s fist. It is impossible to shout “Down with Communism!” “Down with Communism!” is a slogan belonging to the enemies of the Grand March, and anyone worried about losing face must remain faithful to the purity of his own kitsch.

the phrases “President Carter,” “our traditional values,” “the barbarity of Communism” all belong to the vocabulary of American kitsch and have nothing to do with the kitsch of the Grand March.

Yes, said Franz to himself, the Grand March goes on, the world’s indifference notwithstanding, but it is growing nervous and hectic: yesterday against the American occupation of Vietnam, today against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia; yesterday for Israel, today for the Palestinians; yesterday for Cuba, tomorrow against Cuba—and always against America; at times against massacres and at times in support of other massacres; Europe marches on, and to keep up with events, to leave none of them out, its pace grows faster and faster, until finally the Grand March is a procession of rushing, galloping people and the platform is shrinking and shrinking until one day it will be reduced to a mere dimension-less dot.

His choice was not between playacting and action. His choice was between playacting and no action at all. There are situations in which people are condemned to playact.

And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.

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

Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

Tereza broke with her not because she was the mother she was but because she was a mother.)

And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. 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.

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.”

“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.”