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Feature: Academic: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Orishas: Orishas:
Emigrante (album) Seriously funny: Changes
english Seriozitate: Cantec de jali The Collection:
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Weight,
the Unbearable Lightness Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, discusses the coexistence of lightness and weight in out lives. As human beings we search for lightness in our lives, the weight of everyday life being too much, but we realize that in the end lightness and weight are the same thing. (inadequate intro paragraphs, too short) Tomas, the main protagonist of Mr. Kundera’s novel, attempts to float above the mundane world of personal responsibility and commitment” (Ebert) by separating sex and love and ridding himself of the oppressions of his job. He believed that the only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other” (Kundera 12). That way, Tomas could pursue his desire for women, without fearing them, fearing that another relationship could turn out the same way as the one with his ex-wife did. He can have a physical relationship without having an emotional one, escaping untouched from the world of sensual pleasure, without any responsibility or commitments, in what Mr. Misurella calls affairs without obligations”. To ensure no emotions develop between himself and his partner, he devised the rule of three” (Kundera 12), allowing him to continue his life as if nothing had happened. (explain the rule of three: sleep with a woman for three days and never see her again or sleep with a woman at an interval of 3 months in order to prevent feelings of love to develop) This absence of responsibilities and ties [to another person] is lightness” (Nabou). After not being allowed to practice medicine, he became a window washer which gave him freedom, allowing him to return to his former libertine life” (Misurella 126). But he only feels true lightness when he is dancing with Tereza telling her that missions are stupid, [he] has no mission. No one has. And it’s terrific relief to realize you’re free, free of all missions” (Kundera 313). A person is truly light when he manages to rid himself of all obligations to others, and when the obligations to themselves are complete, then they can be happy. Just like Tomas, Sabina’s life, which is lacking commitment, fidelity and moral responsibility, is condemned to a lightness of being” (Doctorow). Both Tomas and Sabina experience lightness because they have separated their feelings from their actions. (you need more proof for Sabina) The search for significance in life, for meaning, gives a sense of weight. Tomas looks for meaning in his life by questioning his love for Tereza, how and why they came to be (Kundera 35). It is something that tortures him and he tries to understand why he did the things he did, why he came back to Prague looking for her, giving up his freedom. This obsession gives him great weight, making him consider his actions very carefully, and the path that led to them. He has affairs with other women, while with Tereza, in order to give meaning, weight, to his life. (some critics might argue that these affairs ate Thomas’ attempts to retain lightness) He tries to cling on to the lifestyle he had before he met Tereza. He is consumed by why he comes back to her. She is the only person for whom he has broken his rule of three. He was surprised to wake up and find Tereza squeezing his hand tightly… he could not quite understand what had happened… from that time on they both looked forward to sleeping together” (Kundera 14). Tereza is also haunted by weight. She has nightmares, she lives in them and he is unable to bring her back from sleep” (Misurella 128), because she thinks Tomas does not love her. She is unable, unlike him, to consider sex and love independent of each other; for her they mean the same thing and go together. It is not until the end that she feels the unbearable weight of realizing how selfish and inconsiderate she was: Now she saw that she had been unfair… now they were in a place that lead nowhere… everything bad that’s happened in your life is my fault, It’s my fault you ended up here, as low as you could possibly go” (Kundera 309-313). After leaving him in Zurich, the compassion that drew him to her reasserted itself, and he felt it’s weight: Russian tanks were nothing compared with it” (Kundera 28), so he went back for her, giving up his freedom and later his profession for her. She realized that by moving to the country he had given up his whole life for her, everything he held dear: his profession and pursuing women. It was the return to Prague looking for her, coming back to communism that ended his profession. He did not retract the Oedipus article, and he did not write a letter to the government saying he holds nothing against them. Therefore, he is forced to quit his job and work as a window washer. He feels a double weight, one from quitting his job and reaching the lowest rung on the ladder” (Kundera 192), the other from standing on principle and not being able to retract his article (Kundera 192). The weight of not retracting the article comes from a dark, heavy excitement (Misurella 127) caused by the fact that, as Kundera tells us, in a fascist dictatorial state, everyone knows it will end one day. Everyone looks to the end of the tunnel. In the empire to the east, the tunnel is without end. Without end, at least, from the point of view of human life… the torture, the suffering are the same. But the tunnels are very different lengths” (Kundera qtd in Carlisle). It is the length of the tunnel that makes the weight on Tomas so much greater for not retracting the Oedipus article. The Oedipus essay, that Tomas writes, is published in an abbreviated version in the newspaper. This version offends Tomas but he says nothing, regarding the issue very lightly. (weak topic sentence) But when the Husak regime comes to power, they treat the essay with a lot of weight, and use it to attack Tomas. While for Tomas the essay is light, for the communists it is weight, therefore lightness and weight exist simultaneously: Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness” (Kundera 94). Tomas’ affairs were light for him, while the weigh of them tormented Tereza, giving her nightmares (Kundera 19). She tried an affair of her own, but unlike Tomas, and the same thing that made him light, made her even heavier. The coexistence of lightness and weight is shown in Kundera’s theory of eternal return. The myth states that all things we experience happen again, not once but infinitely, therefore the idea adds weight to experience (Misurella 107). It is by this conclusion that Tomas would pick going back and being with Tereza no matter how many times the choice arose. Therefore, the opposite of the myth represents a world in which, because everything occurs only once and then disappears into the past, existence seems to lose its substance and weight. Since it only happens once everything is pardoned in advance, everything is cynically permitted” (Kundera 4). Kundera tells us that he was touched by some of [Hitler’s] portraits because they reminded [him] of his childhood” (Kundera 4). Although several of his family members perished in the concentration camps, since things happen only once and something like that could not happen again, all that he has left from those unbearably heavy times are memories of a lost period in [his] life” (Kundera 4). It is this ability to turn something of unbearable weight into something so light that makes the lightness so unbearable. (I don’t understand your logic here) Lightness is Tomas’ goal, using Sabina, he liberates himself of all the missions in life achieving a very relaxed, light lifestyle. But Tomas’ search for meaning in his life, his relationship with Tereza, and the Russian invasion puts great weight on him. In the end, there is the realization that light and weight are the same thing, existing at the same time. What is light for Tomas, is weight for Tereza. The myth of eternal return shows how lightness is really weight, and how the weight of life is actually lightness, but a life without any weight makes it an unbearable lightness.
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Alexandru Titeu: welcome, autobiography, collected works, photos, et cetera |
