“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
Feb 1, Sunday, Ames Iowa, Snow
This book discusses how much weight you want to carry for you life: light or heavy
Easy, fun, spontaneous, smile, stateless—-don’t hold on the past and don’t worry about the future, the world is therefore awesome, these define light
Struggle, painful, responsibility, serious, work hard, persistence, hurt, love, critical, these define heavy
My personal experience is that when getting older, we are more likely living towards light: not willing to take any responsibilities beyond responsible for your paychecks, delaying kids, no marriage, even don’t want to commit for a hangout unless it is only one day before … Tomas divorced, I am sure he had gone through a lot of pain, and he no longer wanted to be hurt. So he just slept with different women with very shallow, minimum possible relationships with them. I am sure he was at a somewhat fun at least safe state.
Interestingly, light people often found heavy people admirable. Tereza seems ordinary. She is not particularly beautiful, nice, rich or smart. But yet, Tomas, a man has experienced many women developed a special feeling towards her. Tomas probably falls in love with Tereza’s pain—-Tereza is doing something Tomas does not have courage to do, that is, to love a person. In a lot of parts of the book, the reader is experiencing Tomas’s struggling between living his routine light life and taking up his responsibility for his love.
In terms of writing, there are two things I like about this book. First, in this book, every character has a perspective, Kundera explains well why Tereza is Tereza, and Sabina is Sabina, how their childhood, their moms influence their personalities. Second, Kundera weaved many of his thoughts about life into his story:
- Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it’s a terrific relief to realize you are free, free of all missions.
- Franz’s weakness is called goodness
- 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
- It is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundary of human existence
- Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics lab to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion or not
- Perhaps he sensed that any woman would make his memory of Tereza unbearably painful
- Only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value
- To find that the surface of her face reflected the crew of the soul charging up from below
- She was thinking of the days of Johann Sebastian Bash, when music was like a rose blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence
- We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under: the first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes; the second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes; the third category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love; finally, there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present
I had read this book a year ago, and I thought about it from time to time. Recently, I realize that there is a weight existing in life, and living far away from friends and family makes my life lighter and lighter. I then appreciate Kundera’s wisdom and decided to record his great book here.