Casablanca is
one of my favourite films and I was glad that it was amongst the films
selection on board a long haul flight I had recently taken. There are films
that I can watch repeatedly and some of the scenes in these movies still move
me despite having watched them again and again. I would have
found such films less poignant when I was in my teens as I used to believe that
the choices are our own and it is within our power to make them for which we must be responsible. As time goes by, I realize that there are always difficult choices and
some things are just not meant to be.
Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim |
Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable
Lightness of Being, “ 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.” since ‘the first rehearsal for life is life itself’”.
Which shall we choose ? Weight or
lightness?
The premise of Kundera’s
novel is based on its author’s analysis about the dichotomy between
lightness and weight in the light of Nietzsche’s philosophy about eternal return ( I
must qualify that I have not read Nietzche) and whether we can combat fate
by choosing to live under weight like Tereza and Franz or lightness like the characters, Tomas
and Sabina. As the novel progresses, I find that both lightness and weight are
manifested in all the main characters in the novel, some more apparent than
others.
Tereza yearned for her mother’s
love and was willing to do anything to gain her mother’s
love and she became the ‘culprit’ for her mother’s
unhappiness. One day she decided to escape her old life by finding Tomas with
whom she had recently acquainted when he happened to be in her town, a small
Czech town some hundred and twenty five miles from Prague. Tomas, a
surgeon, went to the hotel
restaurant where she was working as a waitress. When Tomas ordered a cognac,
the radio happened to be playing the composition by Beethoven and she had known
the music from the time a string quartet from Prague visited her town. Whenever
she heard Beethoven, she would be touched. However if it was not Tomas, she
might not have noticed the music.
‘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.’
To assuage Tereza’s
sufferings, Tomas married her and gave her a puppy. Tereza wanted commitment
from Tomas who was incapable of giving up his incessant womanizing. When they
moved to Zurich, Tereza returned
to Prague leaving Tomas behind because she could not live abroad. After two
days of her absence ,Tomas felt like he had been hit by a weight and he had to leave his job and he said “ Es
muss sein” to the Swiss doctor who had offered him the position. Es
muss sein. It must be. Tomas found
himself being burdened by his love for Tereza and he returned to Prague to be
with Tereza.
Sabina, a painter who
had a liaison with Tomas would be ‘charmed more by betrayal than fidelity’ and
she had commitment issues when she was with Franz, a professor in Geneva. Franz
was drawn to Sabina’s persona who was a revelation to him
as she came from a land where there were incidents
of ‘persecution, ‘enemy tanks’,
prison’ , banned books and he felt that by contrast his life was light. Franz desired weight as opposed
to Sabina who represented lightness and to Frank, Sabina represented a
different dimension .
‘Sabina protested. She said that conflict, drama ,and tragedy
didn’t mean a thing; there was nothing inherently valuable in them, nothing
deserving of respect or admiration.’
Sabina had no love for that drama while Franz who, despite having written and published several scholarly books that had received considerable acclaims, felt that words that had been
spewed out were not real life as they were ‘a sea of words with
no weight and no resemblance to life’.
How often we
feel weighed down by our commitments and ties and we struggle to gain an equilibrium between breaking free and a
sense of belonging and finding meaning in our lives.Love, freedom and death make up the meaning of our lives.
We desire lightness yet we cannot help feeling the weight as we celebrate our
ties and commitments. Relationships are what give meanings and value in our
lives. Muss
es sein? Es muss sein. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a novel which I hope to read again as I have not
fully digested all of it and I may have oversimplified my understanding of the
novel. The sentences are beautifully written ( as translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim) and the way the narrator interjects with the author's musings makes me want to read the book again.
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