JULY 12, WEDNESDAY

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

Milan Kundera died yesterday at 94 in Paris. I read his The Unbearable Lightness of Being years ago without being aware of the point that he was trying to make. I liked the title. He grew up in Czechoslovakia under German occupation which then switched over to Russian occupation. He welcomed the change to worker‘s paradise and joined the communist party but then became disenchanted after twice being expelled from the party and finally left Czechoslovakia in 1975 for Paris where he lived the rest of his life. The Unbearable Lightness of Being and his other earlier books were written in Czech while his later books were written in French.

It is the phrase “the unbearable lightness of being” that I want to wonder about, interpreting it in my own way. I have always wondered what it would be like to spend your life or most of your life in an authoritarian country as billions of people have had to do. I think what most distinguishes American culture for me is our insistence on freedom. I know with my German and English relatives that each culture guides children into certain roles, separating the direction they grow up during their school time with some children guided into trades and some headed for the university. In the American educational system we are much freer, or appear to be. You can do poorly as an elementary student and still go on to high school and college and even graduate school. You can fail at one occupation and succeed at another. In the United States you can always start over and reinvent yourself, at least in our imagination. We are freer but those Europeans channeled into trades of various sorts are probably better prepared for life. Even servers in restaurants in Europe are trained and have a sense of vocation and dignity.

The point that I am trying to make is that it is hard for me as an American, steeped in freedom, to imagine living in an authoritarian country with very little freedom of thought or speech or the ability to change occupations and do what you want to. And yet billions of people live out their whole life very unfree.

It is living within a society without freedom where there is no opportunity to create change by your vote or in any other way that I think Kundera is dealing with. Somehow, even within a society with no freedom an individual can live lightly and fully in his own individual way in imagination.

But come to think of it, even in a country that insists on freedom, even going to the extremes of the Freedom Caucus and Lauren Boebert and her insistence on being free to arm herself, the individual has very little chance to change anything. You can vote, but this is only one vote among millions. You can become an activist if activism is your thing and you enjoy fighting for a cause with the fight, itself, energizing you whether you win or not. But if art or imagination or self actualization or gardening is your thing then becoming an activist is a burden that you want to avoid. And this is where the phrase, “the unbearable lightness of being,” resonates with me. Existence within an authoritarian system, or maybe any cultural system that insists that you behave a certain way, can unbearable and stifling. All you can do is to live lightly in your own way within a painful system, a system which you can only deal with as being a painfully comic system with laughter, not joyous laughter, but bitter laughter being the only way to stay sane while at the same time lightly doing whatever makes your life richer whether it is writing novels or gardening or sketching in your back yard. That is what the phrase, “the unbearable lightness of being” means to me.