Lightness and Being

         In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the main character, Tomas, noted that it was only because of a string of coincidences that he ended up meeting, and falling in love, with his partner, Tereza, and that if anything was even slightly different, she could have been spending the rest of her life with a different man. My meeting with this book itself was a similar, if much less dramatic, collision of chance. I had read another of Kundera’s book in a class on Czech literature – it was The Joke – and therefore was familiar with his biography and the themes he played with in his works. Nevertheless, I never got around to reading his most popular book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Years of mandatory readings have left me burnt out on literature, and it wasn’t until I went through a year of business school that I regained a hunger for stories. Near the end of my time at that university, I was moving out and had dumped a bunch of my stuff at a donation spot in the common room. Curious about what other people had dropped off, I perused the pile of books on the table, only for the name Milan Kundera to jump out at me. It was this book. A few months later, it found its way into my room, and on a rainy evening I started going through it with a pen. But that wasn’t the greatest coincidence – the true miracle of luck was the fact that this theme of lightness and heaviness that Kundera covers in this book was one that had been percolating in my mind for the longest time.

 

        I’m not a social person. It’s not because I find it difficult to speak with others – rather, it is the obligations that follow on in the form of friendships that I struggle with. The emotional burden of compassion is one that I struggle to bear, especially when those friends I speak of constantly demand it of me. For others that might be par for the course, but I am a weak person. The enjoyment I receive in socializing with them pales in comparison with the iron price I must pay later. But even without friendship there are other bonds which are not voluntary, and these bonds weigh even more heavily upon me. So, I resolved myself – I will not restrain myself to a partner or to (potential) children, and I will live as lightly and freely as I please. When I thus opened up the first few pages of this book, it felt as if someone had looked into my eyes and understood all my fears and worries and transformed it into a story. Every time the narrator spoke to the reader directly, shedding the pretense of reality, he spoke to me. The greatest coincidence was not finding the book, but rather finding these themes resonating across time and space – from me to Prague, from 2021 to 1968, and beyond.

 

        Looking at Tomas and Tereza and Sabine and Franz and even Karenin, I see fragments of myself and others buried here and there. Sometimes they’re beautiful gems sparkling from within, other times they’re – as Kundera would say – pieces of shit lurking deep within their hearts. Because of the multifaceted and sometimes even contradictory nature of these characters, we can relate to their plight as they struggle against the deafening thunderous sounds of Beethoven’s orchestra: es muss sein! Einmal ist keinmal! They stumble and wander in their ephemeral and therefore non-existent lives, trying their best to achieve what little they can before the end. And after their deaths, their legacies turned into kitsch, reduced to just another image and figure for the Grand March… Kundera makes us interrogate ourselves, digging deep to find out what we want to do in this single life we possess, before we are swept away into kitsch – then nothingness.