the unbearable lightness of being by milan kundera

She had accompanied him to the station and waited with him until he boarded the train for Prague. They had spent scarcely an hour together. He had first met Tereza about three weeks earlier in a small Czech town.

I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do. But only in view of these reflections did I see him clearly. I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. The only certainty is: the weight/lightness opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all. Was he correct or not? That is the question. Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, heaviness or lightness? One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. He seems to have seen the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/nonbeing. Parmenides posed this very question in the fifth century before Christ. What, then, shall we choose? Weight or lightness? The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.Ĭonversely, the absolute absence of burden 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. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. But in the love poetry of every age the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body.

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (“ das grösste Schwergewicht”).Ī life that disappears once and for all, that does not return, is then like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. In the world of eternal return, the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! It is a terrifying prospect.

The unbearable lightness of being by milan kundera