The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

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

If every

What could it have been if not love declaring itself to him?

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.

If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

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

desired but feared them.

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

We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love.

But when we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.

A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were.

Then came the time for her to marry. She had nine suitors. They all knelt round her in a circle. Standing in the middle like a princess, she did not know which one to choose: one was the handsomest, another the wittiest, the third was the richest, the fourth the most athletic, the fifth from the best family, the sixth recited verse, the seventh traveled widely, the eighth played the violin, and the ninth was the most manly. But they all knelt in the same way, they all had the same calluses on their knees.

Tereza’s mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything.

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

True, Tereza fought with her mother until the day she left home, but let us not forget that she never stopped loving her.

The cause of her mother’s malice was that she had suffered so.

The image of her mother marching through the flat naked flashed through Tereza’s mind. She could still hear the laughter behind her back when she ran and pulled the curtains to stop the neighbors from seeing her naked mother.

the bowler hat no longer signified a joke; it signified violence; violence against Sabina, against her dignity as a woman.

The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina’s life. It returned again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat like water through a riverbed. I

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

Franz felt his book life to be unreal. He yearned for real life, for the touch of people walking side by side with him, for their shouts. It never occurred to him that what he considered unreal (the work he did in the solitude of the office or library) was in fact his real life, whereas the parades he imagined to be reality were nothing but theater, dance, carnival—in other words, a dream.

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.

What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.

Tomas kept trying to convince her that love and lovemaking were two different things. She refused to understand.

no-guarantee

mistake: Tereza did not wish to take revenge on Tomas; she merely wished to find a way out of the maze.

What did he look for in them? What attracted him to them? Isn’t making love merely an eternal repetition of the same?

Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world.

Suddenly her heart began to pound and, on the verge of fainting, she pulled Tomas down to the rug and immediately let out an orgasmic shout.

The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public.

The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes.

Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love.

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.

He was sitting at the desk where he usually read his books. At times like these Tereza would come up to him from behind, lean over, and press her cheek to his.