Re: Pjese librash
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
(translated from Czech by Michael Henry Heim)
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-- first two chapters
Part I (Lightness and Weight), Section 2
If every second of our lives recurs 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. That is
why Neitzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of
burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).
If eternal return is the heavist of burdens, then our lives can stand
out against it in all their splendid lightness.
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
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 longs to be
weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore
simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The
heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more
real and truthful they become.
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.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
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Part III (Words Misunderstood), Section 2
The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was
Sabina's life. It returned again and again, each time with a different
meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat like water
through a riverbed. I might call it Heraclitus' ("you can't step twice
into the same river") riverbed: the bowler hat was a bed through which
each time Sabina saw another river flow, another semantic river: each
time the same object would give rise to a new meaning, though all
former meanings would resonate (like an echo, like a parade of echoes)
together with the new one. Each new experience would resound, each
time enriching the harmony. The reason why Tomas and Sabina were
touched by the sight of the bowler hat and made love almost in tears
was that its black presence was not merely a reminder of their love
games but was also a memento of Sabina's father and her grandfather,
who lived in a century without airplanes and cars.
Now, perhaps, we are in a better position to understand the abyss
separating Sabina and Franz: he listened eagerly to the story of her
life and she was equally eager to hear the story of his, but although
they had a clear understanding of the logical meaning of the words
they exchanged, they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of the river
flowing through them.
------------ Section 7
"Living In Truth"
Such is the formula set forth by Kafka somewhere in the diaries or
letters. Franz couldn't quite remember where. But it captivated
him. What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy
enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissumulating. From
the time he met Sabina, however, Franz has been living his lies. He
told his life about nonexistent congresses in Amsterdam and lectures
in Madrid; he was afraid to walk with Sabina through the streets of
Geneva. [...]
For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others,
was possible only away from public: the moment someone keeps an eye on
what we do, we involuntarity make allowances for that eye, and nothing
we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means
living in lies. Saina despised literature in which people give away
all kinds of intimate secrets about themselves and their friends. A
man who loses his privacy loses everything, Sabina thought. And a man
who gives it up of his own free will is a monster. That was why Sabina
did not suffer in the least from keeping her love secret. On the
contrary, only by doing so could she live in truth.
Franz, on the other hand, was certain that the division of life into
private and public spheres is the source of all lies: a person is one
thing in private and something quite different in public. For Franz,
living in truth meant breaking down the barriers between the private
and the public. He was fond of quoting Andre Breton on the desirability
of living "in a glass house" into which everyone can look and there
are no secrets.
-- Section 10
After four years in Geneva, Sabina settled in Paris, but she could
not escape her melancholy. If someone had asked her what had come
over her, she would have been hard pressed to find words for it.
When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives,
we tend to to use expressions of heaviness. We way that something has
become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and
go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what
had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like
leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on
her? No. Her drama was not one of heaviness but of lightness. What
fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of
being.
Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy,
because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But
what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents,
husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love
were gone - what was left to betray?
Sabina felt emptiness all around her. What if that emptiness was the
goal of all her betrayals?
Naturally she had not realized until now. How could she have? The
goals we pursue are always veiled. The 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. Sabina was unaware of the
goal that lay behind her longing to betray. The unbearable lightness
of being - was that the goal?
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Part IV (Soul and Body), Section 11
Much more than the card he slipped her at the last minute, it was the
call of all those fortuities (the book, Beethoven, the number six, the
yellow park bench) which gave her the courage to leave home and change
her fate. It may well be those few fortuities (quite modest, by the
way, even drab, just what one would expect from so lackluster a town)
which set her love in motion and provided her with a source of energy
which she had not yet exhausted at the end of her days.
Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more
precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call
coincidences. "Co-incidence" means that two events unexpectedly happen
at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at
the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even notice
the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied
had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza would never
have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting
of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting
coincidence). But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and
she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be
touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed
by the music and take on its beauty.
Early in the novel [Anna Karenina] that Tereza clutched under her
arm when she went to visit Thomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious
circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run
over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a
train. This symmetrical composition -- the same motif appears at the
beginning and at the end -- may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I
am willing to agree, but only on the condition that you refrain from
reading such notions as "fictive", "fabricated", and "untrue to life"
into the word "novelistic". Because human lives are composed in
precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by this
sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence
(Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then
assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual. Anna
could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death
and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love,
enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without
realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws
of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by
mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the
railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza
and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such
coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a
dimension of beauty.
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Part V (Lightness and Weight), Section 15
What then should he have done? Sign or not?
Another way of formulating the question is, Is it better to shout and
thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower
death?
Is there any answer to these questions?
And once again he thought the thought we already know: Human life
occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our
decisions is good and which bad is that in a given situation we can
only make one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth
life in which to compare various decisions.
History is similar to individual lives in this respect. There is only
one history of the Czechs. One day it will come to an end as surely as
Tomas's life, never to be repeated.
In 1618, the Czech estates took courage and vented their ire on the
emperor reigning in Vienna by pitching two of his high officials out
of a window in the Prague Castle. Their defiance led to the Thirty
Years War, which in turn led to the almost complete destruction of the
Czech nation. Should the Czechs have shown more caution than courage?
The answer may seem simple; it is not.
Three hundred and twenty years later, after the Munich Conference of
1938, the entire world decided to sacrifice the Czechs's country to
Hitler. Should the Czechs have tried to stand up to a power eight
times their size? In contrast to 1618, they opted for caution. Their
capitulation led to the Second World War, which in turn led to the
forfeit of their nation's freedom for many decades or even centuries.
Should they have shown more courage than caution? What should they
have done?
If Czech history could be repeated, we should of course find it
desirable to test the other possibility each time and compare the
results. Without such an experiment, all considerations of this kind
remain a game of hypotheses.
Einmal ist Keinmal. What happens but once may as well not have
happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor
will the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is
a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind's fateful inexperience.
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.
Once more, and with a nostalgia akin to love, Tomas thought of the
tall, stooped editor. The man acted as though history were a finished
picture rather than a sketch. He acted as though everything he did
were to be repeated endlessly, to return eternally, without the
slightest doubt about his actions. He was convinced he was right, and
for him that was a sign not of narrowmindedness but of virtue. Yes,
that man lived in a history different from Tomas's: a history that was
not (or did not realize it was) a sketch.
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Part VI (The Grand March)
Stalin's son had a hard time of it. All evidence points to the
conclusion that his father killed the woman by whom he had the
boy. Young Stalin was therefore both the Son of God (beacuse his
father was revered like God) and His cast-off. People feared him
two-fold: he could injure them both by his wrath (he was, after all,
Stalin's son) and his favor (his father might punish his cast-off
son's friends in order to punish him).
Rejection and privilege, happiness and woe -- no one felt more
concretely than Yakov how interchangeable opposites are how stop the
step from one pole of human existence to the other.
...
If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no
difference between sublime and paltry, if the Son of God can undergo
judgement for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and
becomes unbearably light. When Stalin's son ran up to the electrified
fence and hurled his body at it, the fence was like the pan of a
scales sticking pitifully up in the air, lifted by the infinite
lightness of a world that has lost its dimensions.
Stalin's son laid down his life for shit. But a death for shit is not
a senseless death. The Germans who sacrified their lives to expand
thier country's territory to the east, the Russians who died to extend
their country's power to the west -- yes, they did for something
idiotic, and their deaths have no meaning or general validity. Amid
the general idiocy of the war, the death of Stalin's son stands out as
the sole metaphysical death.
---
Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the
first chapter of GEnesis, which tells us that the world was created
properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore
entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a 'categorical
agreement with being'.
The fact that until recently the word "shit" appeared in print as
"s---" has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can't claim
that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a
metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the
unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in
which case don't lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in
an unacceptable manner.
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical
agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone
acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called
'kitsch'. ... Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original
metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both
the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes
everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human
existence.
(13)
Since the days of the French revolution, one half of Europe has been
referred to as the left, the other half as the right. Yet to define
one or the other by means of the theoretical principles it professes
it all but impossible. And no wonder: political movements rest not so
much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and
archtypes that come together to make up this or that 'political
kitsch'.
The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the
political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies. The
Grand March is the splended march on the road to brotherhood, equality,
justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwitstanding, for
obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.
...
What makes a leftist is not this or that theory but the ability to
integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.
(29)
What remains of the dying population of Cambodia?
One large photograph of an American actress holding an Asian child in
her arms.
What remains of Tomas?
An inscription reading HE WANTED THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH.
What remains of Beethoven?
A frown, an improbable mane, and a somber voice intoning "Es Muss Sein!"
What remains of Franz?
An inscription reading A RETURN AFTER LONG WANDERINGS.
And so on and so forth. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned
into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
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Part VII (Karenin's Smile)
The collective farm chairman became a truly close friend. He had a wife,
four children, and a pig he raised like a dog. The pig's name was Mefisto,
and he was the pride and main attraction of the village. He would answer
his master's call and was always clean and pink; he paraded about on his
hoofs like a heavy-thighed woman in high heels.
(4)
Why was the word "idyll" so important to Tereza?
Raised as were on the mythology of the Old Testament, we might say
that an idyll is an image that has remained with us like a memory of
Paradise; life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to
the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known
objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.
