Unbearable Lightness of Being

Unbearable Lightness of Being: Milan Kundera

20
In languages that derive from Latin, " compassion" means we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning,"pity" ( french, pitie') notes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. "To take pity on a woman," means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.
21
He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more.

29
The realization that he was utterly powerless was like the blow of a sledgehammer, yet it was curiously calming as well. No one was forcing him into a decision. He felt no need to stare at the walls of the houses across the courtyard and ponder whether to live with her or not. Tereza had made the decision for herself.
He had spent seven years of life with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.
... Now what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained.

35
We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the " Es muss sien" to our own great love.
40
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.
48
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of neccessity, everything expected , repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.

49
If love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.
51
It may well be those few fortuities ( quite modest, by the way, even drab, just what would expect from so lackluster a town) which set her love to motion and provided her with a source of energy she had not yet exhausted at the end of her days.
But her nascent (developing) love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music... Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.
52
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 as a 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 his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethovens music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life.
... 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.
54
Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas' hand with such tenacity, we can understand why; she had been training for it since childhood.
Tereza had a good deal more than they and learned a good deal more about life, but she would never realize it.





56
" You mean you were really jealous?" she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Prize...
Before long, unfortunately, she began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealousy not as a Nobel Prize, but a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death.
** Human nature takes this sentiment labels it love, deprives it of growth and forces it into something its not.
CS Lewis- When Love ceases to be a God it will cease to be a demon

58
That was what the dream was meant to tell Tomas, what Tereza was unable to tell him herself. She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were the same. 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 alike, made no distinction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He had sent her back into the world she tried to escape, sent her to march naked with the other naked women.

59
The dreams were eloquent, they were also beautiful... Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication if you like) it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine- to dream about things that have have not happened- is among mankind's deepest needs. ... If dreams were not beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten.
.... Tereza, what am I losing you to? ... Every night you dream of death as if you really wished to quit this world.

Anyone whose goal is "something higher" must expect someday to suffer vertigo. 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 emptiness below us which tempts us and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we define ourselves.

61
She was in the grip of an insurperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo.
"Pick me up" is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, patiently.

73
"what's the matter?' he asked
'Nothing"
What do you want me to do for you?"
"I want you to be old. Ten years older. Twenty years older!"
What she meant was: I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.

75
In spite of their love, they had made each other's life hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak.

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave. ( that sucks)

76
She longed to do something that would prevent her from turning back to Tomas. She longed to destroy brutally the last seven years of her life. It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall.
We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

83
The only explanation I can suggest is that for Franz, love was not an extension of public life but its antithesis. It meant a longing to put himself at the mercy of his partner. He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against all possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall. That is why I can say that for Franz, love meant the constant expectation of a blow.
86
She was amazed the years she had spent pursuing one lost moment
88
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 meaning of the words they exchanged, they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of the river flowing through them.
What made him feel uncomfortable was its very lack of meaning.
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs, but if they meet when they are older their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
91
Betrayal. From tender youth we are told by 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 nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.
...
But if we betray B for whom we betrayed A, it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A. The life of a divorcee painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents she had betrayed. The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.

94
Living for Sabeena meant seeing

95
But the larger a man grows in his own inner darkness, the more his outer form diminishes. A man with closed eyes is a wreck of a man... darkness did not mean inifinity for her, it meant a disagreement with what she saw, the negation of what was seen, the refusal to see.

103
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
104
Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are less in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks 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. Even in wartime, in Hitler's time, in Stalin's time, through all occupations. When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were beautiful as a lullaby.
113
Franz, 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.
* I once held this as a valuable aim... I don't know if I necessarily see nor merit this
121
When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness.
136
Tereza was suddenly reminded of her mother: that perverse need one has to expose one's ruins, one's ugliness, to parade one's misery, to uncover the stump of one's amputated arm and force the whole world to look at it.
139
The only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.

177
Whether they new or didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. Is a fool on the thrown relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?