Lightness and Weight

I just finished reading the Kundera novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. At first I didn't get very into it. I started reading it at the wrong time maybe, but after a while I realized how beautiful it was. The language, the metaphors, the characters, all so complex, real but dreamlike at the same time. Kundera has a very rare insight into human emotions, I think. It's interesting because a lot of the plot revolves around love affairs and I thought that the female perspectives in the story were so accurate and the emotions so real, and when we talked about it in my book club - mostly girls but some guys too - the one male present also thought that the male emotions and actions were realistic and very insightful.

Lightness and weight, at the center of the novel, are easy to be attracted to. Some characters are so afraid of weight, they keep betraying people and nations and ideals to live unattached and light, while others need the weight of a man on top of them, of love, the weight of national identity and attachment to a country. I can identify with both.

Sabina leaves her country and can never find a real home, is always running away from people, from things, from her lover. She likes cemeteries, but only the ones that have soil covering the graves. She is frightened by heavy stones on top of graves: for her, that symbolizes the finality of death, the inevitable fact that once we are dead, we cannot leave the grave. She is always running away from that feeling of being stuck, being held hostage by some heavy object or feeling, like love of a man or of a country.

Teresa is completely defined by her love for her husband, even though she knows that he is a womanizer and sleeps with countless other women. The only feeling stronger than her love for him is her love of her country: when they emigrate to Switzerland, only after a few weeks, she goes back to Prague, choosing the communist oppression.

Is it possible to find a balance between lightness and weight? Maybe Tomas did: he was deeply in love with Teresa and yet he had numerous affairs with women he did not care about, but was so fascinated by. It was the "pursuit of the unimaginable" that drove him from woman to woman, trying to find that little piece inside each of them that was different from all of the others. Even with all his womanizing, I could not help but like Tomas. It was very clear that he had a deep love for Teresa and she was the only woman he loved.

We had some disagreement about whether his character was likable or not, one of my friends arguing that his affairs were inexcusable. Maybe so, but in the end, I felt that he was the only character in the novel who could find a balance between lightness and weight; and isn't that what happiness is; finding balance?

And just an example of Kundera's insight into human emotions. He writes about vertigo: "What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves." As I was standing on the subway platform today, looking straight at the approaching train, I had the strange feeling - which I often get in this situation - that it would be so easy, so effortless, would only take the movement of a few muscles to "fall" in front of the train. Don't get me wrong, I am not in any way suicidal. In fact, this feeling, this thought terrifies me. I think it's a form of vertigo. Like Kundera describes it: we realize how tempting the emptiness below or in front of the train are, and how easy it would be to fall into it, and our fear of it stops us.