Unbearable Lightness Of Being
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A touching and sad novel, at once a compelling love story, philosophical text, and dialogue with Frederich Nietzsche — The Unbearable Lightness of Being is all of these and more, perhaps most importantly a manifesto of embracing nihilism.
Milan Kundera opens the novel with a discourse on Nietzsches doctrine of the eternal recurrence. He rejects any view of the recurrence as being real or metaphysical. It is metaphorical he assures us. In a world of objective meaninglessness one must fall into nihilism unless one acts as if ones acts recur eternally, thus giving our acts “weight,” the weight of those choices we make, as though recurring eternally, living forever. Kundera rejects Nietzsches optimism and in compelling detail and poignancy he give us the story of the painful love affair of Tomas and Tereza, condemned by fate and choice to live together, yet never ceasing to cause each other enormous pain and suffering.
Tomas, a surgeon living in Prague just before the famous 1968 Spring uprising, is an incorrigible womanizer, unable to resist his unending stream of meaningless sexual flings. Tereza is drawn to him, sent to him by fate, like Moses in a bulrush basket. Tomas constant infidelities numb her with pain; yet her unending love and need draw her to him inexorably, and he to her. From the text of a Beethoven composition he takes the line: “Es muss Sein” (it must be). He even leaves the safety of Switzerland to follow her back to Prague, sealing their fate to that oppressive regime following the Russian takeover.
Sabina, Czech artist fascinated with aspects of incomparable images in which the interface of the images betray one another. In her own life, including her love affairs with Tomas and Franz, she is the eternal betrayer, not unlike the tensions in her own paintings.
Franz is the idealist, the man who dreams the dream of the great march of history toward some better state and ends up being killed in a trivial mugging while in Thailand on a large but failed humanitarian venture.
A central theme which runs through the novel is the possibility of being having weight — something to give it serious meaning. There are at least two cases where Tomas does find such meaning. The first is his “Es muss Sein” in relation to Tereza. They are safely in Switzerland after escaping the Russian invasion. But eventually, Tereza, wishing to free Tomas for his mistresses, unable to bear the pain of it and feeling lost away from Prague, leaves to go back. Tomas follows in a few days, knowing that somehow this is crazy and he is condemning himself to misery, but he must go, it is his fate and he returns. In a second incident he had published a letter to the editor in a newspaper which explored the notion of being responsible for acts whether or not one KNEW the outcome. His model case was Oedipus who had no idea he was violating so many social and moral rules of his society. Tomas is speaking about those in Czechoslovakia who acted in a similar manner toward the Russians. Later on this is taken as a socially subversive point of view and he is asked to retract. For reasons he himself hardly understands he refuses and his refusal causes him to be banned as a physician and condemned to low-level manual labor, first in Prague and later on a collective farm in a rural area.
But even these choice are more his fate than a choice of meaning. The notion of fate, or what Nietzsche refers to as “amor fati” (love of fate) is the notion that nature somehow presents us with situations which we cannot escape and we simply have to bear them. Tomas must accept and bear his love