The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"This is another novelist and a lot of the book is not about time and eternity. It is more about human relationships. But Kundera does keep picking up the question of human existence in time. The title, The Unbearable Lightness of Being , comes from the main character’s obsession with the fact that all we have is the now, nothing else except the ever moving now. He wants to know what is happening about our existence in relation to the ephemeral present, which comes and goes so quickly. Since we are stuck in this ever-moving moment, how do the past and future relate to that, and what difference do moral choices make over a lifetime? What is the meaning of our existence? We are stuck in this ever-moving moment, and how does the past relate to that? One meditation in there is where he takes up Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return – an ancient Hindu concept – in which everything that happens continues to happen eternally, an infinite number of times, over and over, like a broken record. And then when he considers that he asks himself whether Nietzsche was serious about this, and what difference it would make if he was right. He says, yes life is meaningless because you have no way to get out of this cycle. It is hell because all the bad things will happen again. And he puts it this way: 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… There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off heads. Kundera was living in Czechoslovakia at the time of Soviet occupation. In a way, it is a very Eastern European Cold War take on what it is to be stuck in time. The eternal he considered is Nietzsche’s eternal, which is the eternal return, which is very frightening. The main character is paralysed between life at that moment and whatever there might be that has meaning."