The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

she discovered that the transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness.

Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and

At the moment he penetrated Sabina, however, he closed his eyes. The pleasure suffusing his body called for darkness. That darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we each carry within us. (Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!)

The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It’s unintentional.

conflict, drama, and tragedy didn’t mean a thing; there was nothing inherently valuable in them, nothing deserving of respect or admiration.

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That’s why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.”

the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery.

Franz reacted with a mixture of disgust (he knew that after the accident in question his wife had fallen into a deep depression and complained incessantly) and admiration (her ability to transform everything she experienced was a sign of true vitality).

The only people in the pews were old men and old women, because they did not fear the regime. They feared only death.

What she had unexpectedly met there in the village church was not God; it was beauty. She knew perfectly well that neither the church nor the litany was beautiful in and of itself, but they were beautiful compared to the construction site, where she spent her days amid the racket of the songs. The mass was beautiful because it appeared to her in a sudden, mysterious revelation as a world betrayed.

Franz may be strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he loves, he’s weak.

“Why don’t you ever use your strength on me?” she said. “Because love means renouncing strength,” said Franz softly. Sabina realized two things: first, that Franz’s words were noble and just; second, that they disqualified him from her love life.

A man who loses his privacy loses everything,

And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

a person is one thing in private and something quite different in public. For Franz, living in truth meant breaking down the barriers between the private and the public.

The eyes, as the saying goes, are windows to the soul. Franz’s body, which thrashed about on top of hers with closed eyes, was therefore a body without a soul.

He was glad to have picked it out himself. For twenty years he had lived among furniture not of his own choosing. Marie-Claude had taken care of everything. At last he had ceased to be a little boy; for the first time in his life he was on his own.

Sabina’s physical presence was much less important than he had suspected. What was important was the golden footprint, the magic footprint she had left on his life and no one could ever remove. Just before disappearing from his horizon, she had slipped him Hercules’ broom, and he had used it to sweep everything he despised out of his life. A sudden happiness, a feeling of bliss, the joy that came of freedom and a new life—these were the gifts she had left him.

We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose.

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.

Sabina felt emptiness all around her. What if that emptiness was the goal of all her betrayals?

The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

Because Franz was so afraid of being found out, he had never asked for any of Sabina’s paintings or drawings or even a snapshot of her. As a result, she disappeared from his life without a trace. There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her.

He nourished the cult of Sabina more as religion than as love.

He closed his eyes and dreamed. He closed his eyes as he had closed them on Sabina’s body in fifteen European hotels and one in America.

And if various parts of her body began to grow and shrink and Tereza no longer looked like herself, would she still be herself, would she still be Tereza? Of course. Even if Tereza were completely unlike Tereza, her soul inside her would be the same

Had her body the right to call itself Tereza? And if not, then what did the name refer to? Merely something incorporeal, intangible?

She felt disgusted by it. It lacked the power to become the only body in Tomas’s life. It had disappointed and deceived her.

If her body had failed to become the only body for Tomas, and thereby lost her the biggest battle of her life, it could just as well go off on its own!

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.

She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness!

From childhood, she had regarded books as the emblems of a secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn’t possibly hurt her.

Oddly enough, the touch of his hand immediately erased what remained of her anxiety. For the engineer’s hand referred to her body, and she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies.

But she also knew that if the feeling of excitement was to continue, her soul’s approval would have to keep mute.

she tried to withstand the strong desire to burst out crying in his presence. She knew that her failure to withstand it would have ruinous consequences. She would fall in love with him.

In its solitude and desolation she saw a reflection of her own fate, and she repeated several times to herself, I have no one left in the world but Tomas.

Did her adventure with the engineer teach her that casual sex has nothing to do with love? That it is light, weightless? Was she calmer now? Not in the least.

Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice. Tomas had no defense against the lure of love, and Tereza feared for him every minute of every hour.

What weapons did she have at her disposal? None but her fidelity.

With time she screamed less, but her soul was still blinded by love, and saw nothing. Making love with the engineer in the absence of love was what finally restored her soul’s sight.

She did not desire her lover’s body. She desired her own body, newly discovered, intimate and alien beyond all others, incomparably exciting.

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.

Overnight, the country had become nameless.

An old Czech town was covered with Russian names. Czechs taking pictures of the invasion had unconsciously worked for the secret police. The man who sent her to die had worn a mask of Tomas’s face over his own. The spy played the part of an engineer, and the engineer tried to play the part of the man from Petrin. The emblem of the book in his flat proved a sham designed to lead her astray.

What would happen if Tomas were to receive such a picture? Would he throw her out? Perhaps not. Probably not. But the fragile edifice of their love would certainly come tumbling down. For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.

She was afraid of Tomas. He was too strong for her; she was too weak.

the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise.

Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.