Detailed notes on the book [[The Unbearable Lightness of Being]]. # 1. Lightness and Weight ## 1.1 Eternal Return The novel opens with [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]'s eternal return. Both its consequences (and consequences from its absence) are explored, using the romanticism around the [[French Revolution]] as an example. > [!quote] > Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? ==In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.== ## 1.2 Parmenides and Lightness > [!quote] > Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative. Was he correct or not? That is the question. The certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all. ## 1.3 Tomas > [!quote] > I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. Such an impactful opener. Both in this book and in [[Immortality]] Kundera alludes to the birth of characters; He breaks the fourth wall, reminding us that everything happening in this book is his creation. But Kundera doesn't appear omnipotent. Once born, the characters have minds of their own, independent of their creator. The plot begins from this chapter. Tereza is sick in his house, after their one night stand. Tomas is struggling with the attachment with a woman for the first time. *Should I let her return*? Kundera ties back to the Eternal Return, how it's only natural for us to not know the answer. > [!quote] > *Einmal ist Keinmal* ## 1.4 Tereza Tereza comes back to Prague, holding a volume of [[Anna Karerina]] tight (secret code to her world, as explored later) and her entire life packed in the suitcase. The metaphor of the bulrush basket. > [!quote] On [[Metaphors|Metaphors]] > Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love. ## 1.5 Sabina > [!quote] Kitsch > The woman who understood him best was Sabina. She was a painter. "The reason I like you," she would say to him, "is you're the complete opposite of kitsch. ==In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster.==" ## 1.9 Compassion vs co-sentiment / co-feeling I seldom like _etymological_ or dictionary-definition arguments, especially as an opener. However, these are some words that I never got accustomed to in English (compassion, sympathy, empathy, pity). _empathy_ is the closest word to co-sentiment / co-feeling, but there’s still mismatch of nuance here. # 2. Soul and Body ## 2.17 Vertigo > [!quote] > What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. ==It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts us and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves==. ## 2.27 Line and Circle > [!quote] > Dog time cannot be plotted along a straight line; it does not move on and on, from one thing to the next. It moves in a circle like the hands of a clock, which — they too, unwilling to dash madly ahead — turn round and round the face, day in and day out following the same path. Related: - [[The Human Condition]]'s rectilinear nature of labor. - [[Ayn Rand|Rand]]'s [[Atlas Shrugged]] # [[The Unbearable Lightness of Being - 3. Words Misunderstood|3. Words Misunderstood]] # 4. Soul and Body ## 4.4 Concentration Camp > [!quote] > When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp? \[...\] ==A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy==. Goes back to Sabina's definition of [[#Living in Truth]]. ## 4.8 What is flirtation > [!quote] > What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee. # [[The Unbearable Lightness of Being - 5. Lightness and Weight|5. Lightness and Weight]] # 6. The Great March ## 6.1 The parable of Yakov's death ## 6.2 Interpretation of Yakov's death > [!quote] > 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 (because his father was revered like God) and His cast-off==. People feared him twofold: he could injure them by both 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 short the step from one pole of human existence to the other. I was thinking; many political exiles and hostages live in this opposite (ex: [[Mary Queen of Scots]]). Their presence is a latent threat, yet either the cost or the repercussions of eliminating them is too strong, so they live on. > [!quote] > Then, at the very outset of the war, he fell prisoner to the Germans, and other prisoners, belonging to an incomprehensible, standoffish nation that had always been intrinsically repulsive to him, accused him of being dirty. Was he, who bore on his shoulders a drama of the highest order (as fallen angel and Son of God), to undergo judgment not for something sublime (in the realm of God and the angels) but for shit? Were the very highest of drama and the very lowest so vertiginously close? > > ==Vertiginously close? Can proximity cause vertigo?== > > It can. When the north pole comes so close as to touch the south pole, the earth disappears and man finds himself in a void that makes his head spin and beckons him to fall. If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light. When Stalin's son ran up to the electrified wire 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. Another mention of the word *vertigo* (2.17). > [!quote] > Stalin's son laid down his life for shit. But a death for shit is not a senseless death. The Germans who sacrificed their lives to expand their country's territory to the east, the Russians who died to extend their country's power to the west - yes, they died 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==. ## 6.3 The problem of divine intestines ## 6.4 The problem of divine intestines, continued ## 6.5 [[Kitsch]] > [!quote] > "Kitsch" is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: ==kitsch is the absolute denial of shit==, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which essentially unacceptable in human existence. ## 6.23 Others' gaze > [!quote] > We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. > > The first category longs for the ==look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes==, in other words, for the look of the public. That is the case with the German singer, The American actress, and even the tall, stooped editor with the big chin. \[...\] > > The second category is made up of people who have a ==vital need to be looked at by many known eyes==. \[...\] Marie-Claude and her daughter belong in the second category. > > Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be ==constantly before the eyes of the person they love==. \[...\] Tereza and Tomas belong in the third category. > > And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the ==imaginary eyes of those who are not present==. They are the dreamers. Franz, for example. He traveled to the borders of Cambodia only for Sabina. As the bus bumped along the Thai road, he could feel her eyes fixed on him in a long stare. Tomas's son belongs in the same category. ## 6.29 Epitaphs > [!quote] > What remains of the dying population in 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==. # 7. Karenin's Smile ## 7.2 [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], [[Descartes]]' *Animal Automata* > [!quote] > That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications. ==Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horses for Descartes==. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse. This interpretation of Nietzsche's madness elevates Tereza to the same level, making her the heroin of the story. Just like Nietzsche Tereza struggles and is rejected (and rejects) the society. 7.4 explores this deeper; that the love between a human and an animal is *better* than a lover between two humans. ## 7.4 Love with Animal, Happiness is the longing for repetition > [!quote] > the love that tied her to Karenin was better than the love between her and Tomas. ==Better, not bigger==. Tereza did not wish to fault either Tomas or herself; she did not wish to claim that they could love each other *more*. Her feeling was rather that, given the nature of the human couple, the love of man and woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog, that oddity of human history probably unplanned by the Creator. > > It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. ... ==No one forced her to love Karenin; love for dogs is voluntary==. > [!quote] > If Karenin had been a person instead of a dog, he would surely have long since said to Tereza, "Look, I'm sick and tired of carrying that roll in my mouth every day. Can't you come up with something different?" And therein lies the whole of man's plight. ==Human time do not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition==. Goes back to the topic of [[#2.27 Line and Circle]], coming with quite a profound conclusion of *why man cannot be happy*. ## 7.7 The Last Station > [!quote] > "Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions." > \[...\] > The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.