The unbearable lightness of being
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Authors: Milan Kundera
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Also by Milan Kundera
THE JOKE LAUGHABLE LOVES LIFE IS ELSEWI
IERE THE FAREWELL PARTY THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING JACQUES AND HIS
MASTER THE ART OF THE NOVEL IMMORTALITY
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Translated from the Czech
by Michael Henry Heim
Harper
Perennial
A Division of
HwperCollins
Publishers
Portions of this work originally
appeared, in somewhat different form. in
The New Yorker.
A
hardcover edition of this book was published in 1984 by Harper & Row,
Publishers, Inc.
the unbearable lightness of
BEING. English translation copynght � 1984 by Harper
& Row, Publishers, Inc. Translated from
Nesnesitelna lehkost byti,
copyright � 1984 by Milan Kundera. All rights reserved. Printed in the United
States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address
HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
First Harper Colophon edition published
1985. Reissued in Perennial Library edition 1987. Reissued in HarperPerennial
edition 1991.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kundera, Milan.
The unbearable lightness of being.
"Perennial Library"
I. Heim,
Michael Henry. II. Title. PG5039.21.U6U5 1987
891.8'635
83^8363
ISBN 0-06-091465-3 (pbk.)
96
RRD H
40 39
CONTENTS
PART ONE Lightness and Weight
1
PART TWO Soul and Body
37
PART THREE Words Misunderstood
79
PART FOUR Soul and Body
729
PART FIVE Lightness and Weight
173
PART SIX The Grand March
241
PART SEVEN Karenin's Smile
279
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 mean nothing. We need take no more note of it than of a
war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered
nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished
in excruciating torment.
Will the war
between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century itself be altered if it
recurs again and again, in eternal return?
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It will: it will become a solid mass,
permanently protuberant, its inanity irreparable.
If the French Revolution were to recur
eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because
they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the
Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become
lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference
between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who
eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
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.
Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing
a most incredible sensation. Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched
by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during
the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler's concentration camps;
but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period in my
life, a period that would never return?
This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the
profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence
of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore
everything cynically permitted.
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
Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens
(das
schwerste Gewicht).
If eternal return is the heaviest 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?
Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth
century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites:
light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold,
being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness,
warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive
and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is
positive, weight or lightness?
Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight
negative.
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