on choosing to be [ ]

It is hard for a novelist to give examples of his idea of lightness from the events of everyday life, without making them the unattainable object of an endless quete. This is what Milan Kundera has done with great clarity and immediacy. His novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is in reality a bitter confirmation of the Ineluctable Weight of Living, not only in the situation of desperate and all-pervading oppression that has been the fate of his hapless country, but in a human condition common to us all, however infinitely more fortunate we may be. For Kundera the weight of living consists chiefly in constriction, in the dense net of public and private constrictions that enfolds us more and more closely. His novel shows us how everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight. Perhaps only the liveliness and mobility of the intelligence escape this sentence-- the very qualities with which this novel is written, and which belong to a world quite different from the one we live in.
-- pp. 7, "Lightness."

The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius is the first great work of poetry in which knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is infinitely minute, light, and mobile. Lucretius set out to write the poem of physical matter, but he warns us at the outset that this matter is made up of invisible particles. He is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us is that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies. Lucretius' chief concern is to prevent [9] the weight of matter from crushing us. Even while laying down the rigorous mechanical laws that determine every event, he feels the need to allow atoms to make unpredictable deviations from the straight line, thereby ensuring freedom both to atoms and to human beings. The poetry of the invisible, of infinite unexpected possibilities-- even the poetry of nothingness-- issues from a poet who had no doubts whatever about the physical reality of the world.
...For Ovid, too, everything can be transformed into something else, and knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.

- Italo Calvino, pp. 8-9, "Lightness," Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

patterns and passions (kundera)

Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to posses the endless variety of the objective female world.

The obsession of the former is lyrical: what they seek in women is themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by definition something that can never be found, they are disappointed again and again. The disappointment that propels them from woman to woman gives their inconstancy a kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental women are touched by their unbridled philandering.

The obsession of the latter is epic, and women see nothing the least bit touching in it: the man projects no subjective ideal on women, and since everything interests him, nothing can disappoint him. This inability to be disappointed has something scandalous about it. The obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption (and redemption by disappointment).

Because the lyrical womanizer always runs after the same type of woman, we even fail to notice when he exchanges one mistress for another. His friends perpetually cause misunderstandings by mixing up his lovers and calling them by the same name.

In pursuit of knowledge, epic womanizers...turn away from conventional feminine beauty, of which they quickly tire, and inevitably end up as curiousity collectors. They are aware of this and a little ashamed of it, and to avoid causing their friends embarassment, they refrain from appearing in public with their mistresses.

- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

on going home (the impossibility of); bourgeois

Milan Kundera has said that when you leave your childhood, your relationship to what you have left becomes very important. You develop a certain attachment to it. To affirm your identity, you make the past—which in certain ways you hate—into a beautiful thing. But when you go back and see the actual scene of the crime—I’m joking now—the actual scene of your early years, you don’t recognize it. Either you have embellished it, or you have torn it apart, or you have murdered it, or you have made it into a pie-in-the-sky. Whatever you did, you don’t recognize it. (24-25 (Louise Bourgeois: Drawings & Observations – Louise Bourgeois w/ Lawrence Rinder))