When you can walk away from something, pushing all thoughts away, making your new journey fresh and light yet that horrible, intense feeling of being able to do so becomes a new burden that sinks your heart into a virtual dark pit that swallows your soul now and again.
It is that unbearable feeling of not being grounded to something.
It is like treading the world with air so light, it feels wrong. Human, by nature, has goals, motivation and passion to keep them grounded, with things and persons they love. And when one can lightly disregard this, it’s the feeling of unbearable lightness of being that gets to you. Example : try walk away from your best friend’s life – and you can do it, and make light of it, and ignore it, but it is that unbearable lightness of being that gets to you.
Milan Kundera writes this book with such intensity that it doesn’t punch your soul in a shocking way, but rather pin it to a rock-solid granite before stuffing it between something suffocating, thick and wet – like a cervix.
What I have written thus far is what I collect from my reading of it. The Wiki encapsulate it better :
The German expression Einmal ist keinmal encapsulates “lightness” so: “what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all”; if concluded logically, life ultimately is insignificant. Hence, because decisions do not matter, they are rendered light, because they do not cause personal suffering. Yet, simultaneously, the insignificance of decisions — ourbeing — causes us great suffering, perceived as the unbearable lightness of being consequent to one’s awareness of life occurring once and never again; thus no one person’s actions are universally significant. This insignificance is existentially unbearable, given that people want their lives to have transcendent meaning.
It has this issue of predetermined course of life – how our decision matter little since life takes its own course and we are wound-up to follow it.
Makes you aware of the mere mortality and insignificance of self. Not exactly in a depressing way,that. When you close the book though, you feel like a burden has been lifted of you and you are breathing fresh air.
Read it if you must.