The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.”

This is an oblique criticism of the Czechoslovak government and all totalitarian regimes. It suggests that such governments commit atrocities against their people and then use history, the passage of time, and ideological shifts to “whitewash” their crimes.

“If every second of our lives recurs in an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return, the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. This is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens.”

This passage explains Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return. In it, the narrator posits a world in which each of our actions has the potential to reverberate infinitely and is terrified at the prospect of one small decision having such great potential consequences.

“Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man 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.”

This passage speaks to the narrator’s hunch that lightness is preferable to weight, and that even if a life lived once is less significant, it frees the individual from the possibility of their small decisions creating infinite consequences.

“Einmal est keinmal, says Tomáš to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might not have lived at all.”

This is the German adage that Tomáš uses to approach the idea of eternal return. He will revisit it again and again throughout the course of this story and it will guide several of his major decisions, including his choice to pursue a relationship with Tereza.

“It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived. They were not born of a mother’s womb; they were born of a stimulating phrase or two or from a basic situation.”

This passage is a window into Kundera’s writing style and the scope of his works. He is frequently interested more in ideas than in characters, but he uses characters to explore complex ideas. On one level his works, this one included, can be read as thought experiments. Rather than seeing Tomáš and Tereza as real, living people, they are embodiments of ideas and through them he explores his themes.

“In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels.”

This passage speaks to Tereza’s characterization. She is intelligent and stifled in her small town, and part of what draws her to Tomáš is her perception of him as an intellectual kindred spirit. She is also deeply invested in the meaning of coincidences, and she perceives his book as a sign that the two should be together.

“She had come to him to escape her mother’s world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. But he too had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distinction between Tereza’s body and the other bodies.”

This passage illustrates the difficulty of Tomáš and Tereza’s relationship and speaks to the deep unhappiness she feels about Tomáš’s affairs. It is also an oblique criticism of the communist government, and collectivism in general, for within communist systems, individual bodies are not important. The collective is what matters.

“All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed fabrications. Not so the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, of which both stills and motion pictures are stored in archives throughout the world.”

This passage speaks to Tereza’s characterization, for it is during this period that she blossoms as a photographer and finally has the opportunity to use and be recognized for her talent. It also speaks to the politics of memory and political repression, for it was not until such records existed that accountability became possible for the crimes of totalitarian regimes.

“But then something she had not reckoned with happened; the hat, no longer jaunty or sexy, turned into a monument to time past. They were both touched.”

This passage describes Tomáš and Sabina’s relationship. Although they both favor lightness and freedom, their bond grows over time. The meaning of their relationship changes as the years go by, and they find themselves bound together by their history.

“Betrayal, from tender youth we are told by both father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.”

This passage speaks to Sabina’s characterization. She has a deep need for freedom and individualism, which puts her at odds with her lover Franz. She is much more like Tomáš in this regard, which is why their relationship is so long-lasting.

“Or great men? Jan Hus? None of the people in this room had ever read a line of his works. The only thing they were all able to understand was the flames, the glory of the flames when he was burned at the stake, the glory of the ashes, so for them the essence of being Czech came down to ashes and nothing more.”

Jan Hus was a famous Czech dissident who self-immolated in protest of the repressive Czech regime. In this passage, Sabina realizes that her fellow émigrés see his act of extreme rebellion as something tragic and glorious, but do not fully understand the ideology behind his action. They have read about him but have not read his actual writing.

“She would have liked to tell them that behind communism, behind fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lies a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.”

This passage speaks to Sabina’s characterization and her fundamental opposition to many of Franz’s ideas, but it also speaks to Kundera’s broader thematic engagement with Totalitarian Repression. He argues here that extremism fuels hatred and that the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and its satellite states are possible because of the collective buy-in of a large percentage of the population. He is arguing against the kind of blind, slogan-driven conformity that discourages individual thought and critical engagement with ideology and government policy.

“Every country has its secret police. But a secret police that broadcasts its tapes over the radio—There’s something that could happen only in Prague, something absolutely without precedent!”

This passage speaks to the pervasive presence of the secret police and their incredible reach. Tomáš sees in this radio program a uniquely Czech phenomenon, part of his fierce criticism of the Czech communist regime.

“Anyone who thinks that the communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were not made by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise.”

This passage speaks to the nature of totalitarianism. The narrator argues that zealotry and extremism, not pure evil, are at the root of ideologies like fascism and communism. Ordinary people become complicit in atrocities because they believe their actions will bring about a utopia.

“It is my feeling that Tomáš had long been secretly irritated by the stern, aggressive, solemn ‘Es muss sein!’ and that he harbored a deep desire to follow the spirit of Parmenides and make heavy go light.”

This speaks to Tomáš’s characterization and to the theme of lightness and weight. Tomáš, although at times compelled by weight, seems to prefer lightness. He is drawn to his weighty relationship with Tereza, but escapes it through the light of his erotic friendships.

“Tomáš was obsessed with the desire to discover and appropriate that one-millionth part; he saw it as the core of his obsession. He was not obsessed with women; he was obsessed with what in each of them is unmanageable, obsessed. In other words, with the one-millionth part that makes a woman dissimilar to others of her sex.”

This passage adds depth and philosophical complexity to Tomáš’s philandering. Although his many affairs are central to his identity and greatly impact his marriage, the narrator here posits the infidelities as a search for individualism. This comes into greater focus against the novel’s political backdrop: a totalitarian regime that discourages difference and values the collective above the individual. Sabina rebels against this with her art, and the narrator argues that Tomáš fights it through his romantic relationships: He seeks the individuality his government wants to eradicate.

“Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which are bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.”

This idea is central to the text’s discussion of Lightness and Weight and is one that Tomáš returns to again and again. It functions as a refutation of eternal return because it directly argues that human lives are transient and unrepeatable.

“History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”

This speaks to the central question the novel wrestles with: Which has more value, lightness or weight? Although never neatly resolved, this passage speaks to the preference of characters such as Tomáš and Sabina for lightness over weight.

“Sabina’s inner revolt against communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in nature.”

This passage speaks to Sabina’s characterization. She uses her art to rebel against the government by creating paintings that, although they seem to conform to party standards on the surface, contain hidden, subversive elements.

“In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers were given in advance and preclude any questions.”

This speaks to the cultural conformity that Sabina finds so distasteful. It also shows the level of control that the government had over art, writing, and culture in general. There was no room to question the official aesthetic, and even artists were forced to conform to party standards.

“Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the last stopover between being and oblivion.”

This quote speaks to both Franz’s and Tomáš’s headstones, each of which bear an inscription that has no direct reference to either man’s life. Rather, their inscriptions reflect the kind of false enthusiasm and conformity that characterizes so much communist art. They ignore the “shit,” to use the narrator’s word, and focus on a false positive.

“Was the engineer in fact employed by the secret police? Perhaps he was and perhaps he was not.”

This short quote is a critical piece of engagement with the climate of fear created by totalitarian regimes. Because the network of spies employed by the secret police always contains ordinary people, anyone can be a spy. Individuals are never certain who is watching them and who might denounce them. That Tereza is not sure whether or not her lover had been a spy reproduces this climate of fear and anxiety and allows the reader to better understand the complexity of governmental control over its populace.

“Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.”

In this passage, Tereza thinks that the reason love is so difficult is that humans place too many demands on it. Pure love should be given without condition or even a need for reciprocation. This is a rare moment in which Tereza acknowledges the benefits of lightness, for this kind of love is marked by lightness rather than weight.