Ignu Reads

I came to read this book as a coincidence.


The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is a novel about the ambivalences of life, the dual nature of things, the randomness of life, and kitsch of politics, religion, and people’s choices. The book starts by Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return, Kundera suggests that we only live once, therefore we are ignorant of the value or drastic consequences of our choices simply because we have not lived another life, we don’t have other repeated experiences to compare our choices with, that we have no way of knowing what is meaningful or not since we only have to make one choice, walk one path, and thus reducing the possible turns our life might take either for good or bad. Life is a chess game, once you start playing, there is no turning back.

    Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory or test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion or not.

we cannot 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

Kundera, unlike Albert Camus, perceives the meaninglessness of the universe as unbearable. Lightness rings the bells of positivity, but in terms of existence it is painful. Kundera in different passages keeps making comparisons between the human and the nonhuman experiences , how we are tormented by our consciousness. The novel is full of dualities, soul and body, privacy and publicity, love and sex, lightness and heaviness.

The Unbearable lightness of being is a novel, so we have the talk about the literary aspect of it. Kundera’s novel reminds me a lot of 1984 by George Orwell, it is set up in a world full of crisis, the 80s in a communist Czech invaded by the Soviets, in a world where there is no room for freedom of speech, nor for privacy under strict surveillance system. But Kundera chose four worn down characters, four of them seeking acceptance, lightness, adventure, and sex.  Kundera is giving us a grotesque peek in the era through dreamy characters, heavy characters, and light characters.

These four characters represent the pillars of society, Tomas the surgeon, Tereza the photo journalist, Sabina the artist, and Franz the intellectual, but they’re disappointed and distrustful when it comes to politics, love, and sexuality. All of them are trying to escape a world into a lighter or heavier one, for Tereza she is yearning for a world where she doesn’t feel objectified, where she doesn’t feel like a pile of meat, a world free of her mother and infidelities, but infidelities and betrayal are at the core of the artistic and sexual life of Sabina, who betrayed her destiny and her history that is loaded with restrictions, and ideals, her betrayals make her life light. For Tomas life is a random collection of fortuities, and coincidences, for him love and sex are two separate  things one for pleasure and the other to discover, and to reveal the “I” of his partners, but for Franz sex is a sacred thing, he believes only by being public can one live in truth, he is so romantic about demonstrations and parades, they represent for him what is real.

These four characters come to know each other by random circumstances, they lose contact in random circumstances, and they die in random circumstances, so random and human they are.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is more of a philosophical novel, that a literary novel. One of the interesting things I got from the novel is the notion of kitsch. Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word, it excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence. Kundera playfully expressed his opinions about politics, and social movements using this notion of Kitsch. Totalitarian kitsch that denies people their individualism, their artistic creativity, their sexual orientations, and their equal rights.

Tomas is disappointed both at the soviet union kitsch, and the editor and the comrades kitsch. Both of them wanted to misuse his words, both of them have death lurking behind, both of them wanted him to sign things he didn’t right.

For Sabina, her life was full of kitsch, first communism kitsch, and later on in her artistic life. A lot of artists dealt with censorship in that era, a lot of them had been called degenerate, they were harshly attacked.





By kitsch, Kundera claims that everything is just a dream, a fantasy, and only true theoretically. His characters are apolitical, not in the sense that they’re ignorant, but consciously apolitical.

The things that give our lives meaning have ridiculous roots.  For Tomas and Tereza, their love is what makes their lives meaningful, but looking back at how they came to love each others we find that it was just a coincidence, Beethoven, room number six, the dog waking up at six. They could have fallen in love with a million other possible people. Even Sabina came to be an artist in a ridiculous way.


 

AS soon as the CT scan was done, I began reviewing the images. The diagnosis was immediate: Masses matting the lungs and deforming the spine. Cancer. In my neurosurgical training, I had reviewed hundreds of scans for fellow doctors to see if surgery offered any hope. I’d scribble in the chart “Widely metastatic disease — no role for surgery,” and move on. But this scan was different: It was my own.

When Breath Becomes Air is an unfinished memoir published posthumously written by Paul Kalanithi, he is/was a chief neurosurgeon resident, he also had two master degrees in both literature and the history and philosophy of science. Paul at the age of 35 got diagnosed with stage four lung cancer at a moment when he was close to achieving his potential, and he had wrote the book in his deathbed. The book is an examination of Paul’s life, about what gave his life a meaning. To label the book as a cancer book would be unfair to Paul’s purpose, it is not as much about death as it is about the art of living a meaningful life, it is a profound insight on mortality, philosophy, and literature, it is a book about the classical debates on science vs literature and which one explains the human experience more deeply.




Finishing high school, Paul was interested in literature and philosophy, as well as biology, therefor he decided to major both of them, for him these fields provided different perspectives on mortality, death, and meaning. His biggest dream back then was to be a writer since for him literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, and later on he becomes equally interested in neuroscience which studied the brain as an organism that ignites meaning, language, and interpretations of the world around us. He was driven by his quest for meaning, and he was eager to lead a life that would give him the chance to confront death, and suffering, he chose to find the answers which books didn’t provide about what makes human life meaningful even in the face of death and decay. During his residency as a neurosurgeon he was surrounded by decay and death indeed, each day he witnessed people die, and others live, he saw people losing their identities, their abilities to communicate, and most importantly people losing what gives their life a meaning. Paul became a chief resident, he became more responsible, more experienced, and more insightful, so he could feel the life he was aspiring becoming so reachable, but then he was diagnosed with stage four of lung cancer.




With his diagnosis everything started feeling so uncertain, his dreams, his hopes, and his body were all shifting, and becoming distant with each day. Paul had to decide what gives his life a meaning, he chose to depend his future on how much he will live, he hope he’ll have enough time to preserve both the identity he grew into, and the identities of his future patients, and he had another plan to become a writer and a father if he had less than two years to live.




One of the few lessons to learn from this book, and apply on our lives for a meaningful future is would be keeping on doing the same mundane activities if we knew we would die within the next four or three months. Grab a paper, and write a list of things you would do, for me I would defiantly tell my brother how much I hate him, or write a book, maybe I would tell someone I love how much I love them, or spend more time with those close to me, and be grateful to have them in my life. The lesson we learn from this book is in order to live, we have to embrace the fact of our mortality, to understand what makes our lives meaningful, what is the hidden force that keep us on striving tirelessly.












Another thing I loved about the book is how independent and smooth Paul wrote the events. Paul would have been a great writer if his life had taken a literary turn instead of science. His book is beautifully written, timeless, philosophical, and heartbreaking. The fact that we read a dead person’s memoir is sad, adding up to that the metaphors Paul put into the book, and the poetic glimpses, as well as the deeply spiritual insight the book becomes angst, and gloomy.




The choice of this book came to me when I thought of how a lot of us can’t get over a breakup, or the death of someone either we know, or fictional characters. When The Fault In Our Stars, by John Green came out, the vast majority of readers felt deep attachment to Augustus and Hazel, and everybody felt heartbroken after ending the book, the characters always stay with us, deep down within all of us, they reminded us of people we lost for cancer or other terminal diseases, or in sudden car accidents, we still mourn for them, When Breath Becomes Air helps us both examine our own lives, and make our approach to mortality more graceful. It is a therapeutic book for the simple fact that it is a real discourse on a real people’s own private battle with cancer, and the existential weight.