The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.

Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

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.

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.

he immediately realized that the suitcase contained her life

he claimed the suitcase (it was large and enormously heavy) and took it and her home.

If the Pharaoh’s daughter hadn’t snatched the basket carrying little Moses from the waves, there would have been no Old Testament, no civilization as we now know it! How many ancient myths begin with the rescue of an abandoned child! If Polybus hadn’t taken in the young Oedipus, Sophocles wouldn’t have written his most beautiful tragedy!

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

When, one Sunday, the boy’s mother again canceled a scheduled visit, Tomas decided on the spur of the moment never to see him again.

the country would have to bow to the conqueror. For ever and ever, it will stutter, stammer, gasp for air like Alexander Dubcek. The carnival was over.

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

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

she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.

Beethoven became her image of the world on the other side, the world she yearned for.

“You’re in room six and my shift ends at six.” “Well, my train leaves at seven,” said the stranger.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

the moment he opened the door, her stomach started rumbling terribly. She was mortified. She felt as though she were carrying her mother in her stomach and her mother had guffawed to spoil her meeting with Tomas.

What was screaming in fact was the naive idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of body and soul, banish perhaps even time.

Since childhood, Tereza had seen nudity as a sign of concentration camp uniformity, a sign of humiliation.

“Every night you dream of death as if you really wished to quit this world . . .”

she feared the night ahead, feared her dreams. Her life was split. Both day and night were competing for her.

She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo. “Pick me up,” is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, patiently.

“On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.”

The Russians did not know what to do. They had been carefully briefed about how to behave if someone fired at them or threw stones, but they had received no directives about what to do when someone aimed a lens.

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

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.

It was then he had his first inkling of what it means to suffer.

Betrayal. From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown.

Her longing to betray her father remained unsatisfied: Communism was merely another father, a father equally strict and limited, a father who forbade her love (the times were puritanical) and Picasso, too.

“People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder. But because they’re going deaf, it has to be played louder still.”

Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness.

Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

darkness was the infinite we each carry within us.

“When a society is rich, its people don’t need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit.

No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery.

living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful.

“Love is a battle,” said Marie-Claude, still smiling. “And I plan to go on fighting. To the end.” “Love is a battle?” said Franz. “Well, I don’t feel at all like fighting.” And he left.

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.

The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

A concentration camp is a world in which people live crammed together constantly, night and day.

A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy.

she thought in all innocence that she had once and for all become master of her privacy. But no, her mother’s roof stretched out over the whole world and would never let her be. Tereza would never escape her.

scale the fence of silence between them,

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?