The Intolerable Lightness of Being
It is a lofty, philosophical title - The Intolerable Lightness of Being.
A love story, or stories, of sorts, set in the 1960s Czechoslovakia. A story of marriages and clandestine relationships against a backdrop of economic and political turmoil under looming Soviet presence.
It’s dark and light - a reflection of true life in many ways.
In the simplest terms as I read I first really liked it, then appreciated it.
The book is 304 pages and I have 28 pages noted, a solid 9.2% if we’re speaking exact numbers.
Here are my favourite passages / thoughts / themes - all quoted directly.
Eternal Return
The Idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum. What does this mad myth signify?…
Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty meant nothing…
If every second of our lives records an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity like Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal returns the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. This is why Nietzsche called the idea of external return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).
If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it all in their splendid lightness…
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?…
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Life
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come…
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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 as well not have lived at all.
Body
A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were…
Ever since man has learned to give each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble. He also learned that the soul is nothing more than the gray matter of the brain in action. The odd duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice…
But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.
Fortuities & Chance
After Tomas returned from Prague from Zürich, he began to feel uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six fortuities.
But is it not even in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup…
Beauty
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress…
Franz said, “Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We’ve always had an aesthetic intention and long-range plan. That’s what enabled Western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza.”
Cemeteries
Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks like as though the dead are dancing at a children’s ball. Yes, a children’s ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery.
Surgery & God
Surgery takes the basic imperative of the medical profession to its outermost border, where the human makes contact with the divine. When a person is clubbed violently on the head, he collapses and stops breathing. Some day, he will stop breathing anyway. Murder simply hastens a bit what God will eventually see to on his own.
God, it may be assumed, took murder into account; He did not take surgery into account. He never suspected that someone would dare to stick his hand into the mechanism He invented, wrapped carefully in skin, and sealed away from human eyes.
most of Chapter 16
Somewhere out in space there was a planet where all people would be born again. They would be fully aware of the life they had spent on earth and of all the experience they had amassed here.
And perhaps there was still another planet, where we would all be born a third time with the experience of our first two lives.
And perhaps there were yet more and more planets, where mankind would be born one degree (one life) more mature.
That was Tomas’s version of eternal return.
Of course we here on earth (planet number one, the planet of inexperience) can only fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man on those other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity within man’s power? Can he attain it through repetition?
Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.
Attaching
Tomas thought: Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had.
Writing Genesis
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse…
Even though Genesis says God gave man dominion over all animals, we can also construe it to mean that He merely entrusted them to man’s care. Man was not the planet’s master, merely its administrator, and therefore eventually responsible for his administration.
