Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite numberof times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. Itis a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight ofunbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is whyNietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (dasschwerste Gewicht).

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then ourlives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightnesssplendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it,it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longsto be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is thereforesimultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier theburden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful theybecome.

Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes manto be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth andhis earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they areinsignificant.

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Parmenides posed this very question in the sixthcentury before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites:

light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold,being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness,warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positiveand negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one ispositive, weight or lightness?

Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weightnegative.

Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: thelightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.

Ihave been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of thesereflections did I see him clearly. I saw him standing at the window of his flatand looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what todo.

He had first metTereza about three weeks earlier in a small Czech town. They had spent scarcelyan hour together. She had accompanied him to the station and waited with himuntil he boarded the train. Ten days later she paid him a visit. They made lovethe day she arrived. That night she came down with a fever and stayed a wholeweek in his flat with the flu.

He had come tofeel an inexplicable love for this all but complete stranger; she seemed achild to him, a child someone had put in a bulrush basket daubed with pitch andsent downstream for Tomas to fetch at the riverbank of his bed.

She stayed withhim a week, until she was well again, then went back to her town, some hundredand twenty-five miles from Prague. And then came the time I have just spoken ofand see as the key to his life: Standing by the window, he looked out over thecourtyard at the walls opposite him and deliberated.

Should he callher back to Prague for good? He feared the responsibility. If he invited her tocome, then come she would, and offer him up her life.