The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. 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. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

For me, lightness.

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 you adopt a quantum physics theory that I have, it doesn’t matter what I choose. Because as soon as I make a choice, the universe splits, and in the newly-created universe that I’ve made by my choice, I have made the opposite choice.

And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture. 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.

It was not vanity that drew her to the mirror; it was amazement at seeing her own “I.” She forgot she was looking at the instrument panel of her body mechanisms; she thought she saw her soul shining through the features of her face. She forgot that the nose was merely the nozzle of a hose that took oxygen to the lungs; she saw it as the true expression of her nature.

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.

I have two Ph.D’s (Mathematics and Quantum Mechanics.) I love both math and physics. But I would be a horrible teacher, because I have no patience with people who are slow to learn, and I didn’t think I would get an opportunity to work theoretically. So, my career is that of a watercolour artist. Which I also love. All’s well that ends well, as Shakespeare told us.

profespsors

professors

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine—to dream about things that have not happened—is among mankind’s deepest needs.

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

She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.

Whenever she told him about herself and her friends from home, Franz heard the words “prison,” “persecution,” “enemy tanks,” “emigration,” “pamphlets,” “banned books,” “banned exhibitions,”

This describes the current U.S. I doubt that any American man who fought in WWII ever foresaw that one day the U.S. he loved and fought for would become the second Nazi nation—the second country that the civilised world’s countries would have to put down.

“When a society is rich, its people don’t need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they’ve got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls’ Day. 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.”

Marie-Claude

From that time on she had known that beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere.

Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

I choose to disagree.

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.

Lately, Tereza realized, she positively enjoyed being welcomed into the day by Karenin. Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naive and simple amazement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased.

I feel this same way when my boy cat-child wakes me up in the morning. Every day, he wakes me by sitting on my chest … when I open my eyes, his celery-green eyes are an inch from mine … he can’t wait to start the day.

Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.

The U.S. is now a concentration camp for all of its inhabitants.

Suddenly she longed to dismiss her body as one dismisses a servant:

Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments.

man

Laius

woman

Jocasta (I love mythology)

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers. Then everyone took to shouting at the Communists: You’re the ones responsible for our country’s misfortunes (it had grown poor and desolate), for its loss of independence (it had fallen into the hands of the Russians), for its judicial murders! And the accused responded: We didn’t know! We were deceived! We were true believers! Deep in our hearts we are innocent! In the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they really not know or were they merely making believe?

Probably will be the same thing for the U.S., now that it’s enthroned King/Pope Trump.

it was probable that the majority of the Communists had not in fact known of them.

Me, I think the people of the U.S. were totally aware of what they were voting for. Because the majority of them aren’t living the life of the “American Dream” that they believe is their birthright, they went “dog eat dog.”

But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn’t know is not the main issue; 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?

And King/Pope Trump has been found not responsible for all his crimes and the ruination of a once-proud America, presumably because he is a fool.

When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defense of their inner purity, he said to himself, As a result of your “not knowing,” this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you’ve done? How is it you aren’t horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!

Perhaps his deep-seated mistrust of people (his doubts as to their right to decide his destiny and to judge him) had played its part in his choice of profession, a profession that excluded him from public display.

My job is painting watercolours, on commission, for an art museum. I paint copies of paintings on exhibit for people who want a good copy of a watercolour that’s on exhibit. I don’t have Tomas’s sheltered profession. Everything I do is judged by the museum and its clientele. Luckily, I am very good at what I do, and I have a thick skin.

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

Men who use borrowed flats for rendezvous and never make love to the same woman twice are not so rare.)

The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. 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. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars. The reason we take that right for granted is that we stand at the top of the hierarchy. But let a third party enter the game—a visitor from another planet, for example, someone to whom God says, “Thou shalt have dominion over creatures of all other stars”—and all at once taking Genesis for granted becomes problematical. Perhaps a man hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly!) to the cow.

Be that as it may, Tereza continued on her path, and, watching her heifers rub against one another, she thought what nice animals they were. Calm, guileless, and sometimes childishly animated, they looked like fat fifty-year-olds pretending they were fourteen. There was nothing more touching than cows at play. Tereza took pleasure in their antics and could not help thinking (it is an idea that kept coming back to her during her two years in the country) that man is as much a parasite on the cow as the tapeworm is on man: We have sucked their udders like leeches. “Man the cow parasite” is probably how non-man defines man in his zoology books.

I haven’t eaten anything that ever had eyes, (except potatoes), since the day I left my parent’s home and started college. The day before that—my last day at home with my parents and brothers and sisters—neighbours were having an outdoor barbecue, which we’d all been invited to—and in their backyard, a pig was turning slowly on a spit over a fire. I looked at it and saw its long eyelashes fizzle. I realised that I could find no difference between eating another animal or a fish or a human. That was the beginning of my vegetarian life.

Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

Another image also comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman’s very eyes, put his arms around the horse’s neck and burst into tears.

Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes.

hell

he’ll

Raised as we are on the mythology of the Old Testament, we might say that an idyll is an image that has remained with us like a memory of Paradise: life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.

I don’t know why reading this sentence made me think of something my husband and I had always secretly thought, but didn’t talk to each other about for a number of years. But it did. The idea we both had was that Earth has never felt like home. And that we both feel a longing for our real home. We aren’t religious in the conventional, organised, church-going way. But we are spiritual. We’ve considered that perhaps Earth is a prison. And that the length of our time here is determined by the seriousness of the crime we committed in our real world. That, we decided, would explain why “only the good die young.”

Yet somewhere deep down a thin thread still ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch appearing in it is he himself. The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.

For me, it’s always been cats, but this holds true for both. We are kinder to our animal-children than we are to other people. We don’t make our beloved companions live it out through the bitter end, because we love them. But we (not me, but many people) think humans—dying of cancer, for example—should live through every last horrific moment until the cancer kills them.

They had never fed him sweets, but recently she had bought him a few chocolate bars.

Terrible idea. Chocolate is toxic for dogs.

Tm

I’m