The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Part II)

In Part I, Nietzsche’s approach to affirming life emerges as a weighty embrace of existence, one so profound that he dares us to imagine reliving our current lives in infinite repetition. If every choice we make-down to the smallest, most mundane detail, like the coffee we are sipping at this moment–were to recur endlessly, how intensely would we consider our every action? Faced with the prospect of eternal recurrence, life takes on immeasurable gravity, compelling us to choose with utmost care and attentiveness.

By contrast, at the very outset of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the author juxtaposes Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence with his own view. For Kundera, whether human life on Earth might repeat or fade into finality remains uncertain; yet, to him, the daily experiences we encounter–the conversations, the glances, the fleeting decisions–do not return identically. They occur once only, inevitably light and ephemeral. Without repetition, any sense of enduring significance dissipates, and our choices become weightless gestures in the stream of time. In his world, life’s moments, seemingly inconsequential, cannot solidify into the kind of monumental destiny Nietzsche’s vision implies.

Reflecting on this dilemma, we recognize how difficult it is to determine what we genuinely desire or whether a given decision is ‘right’ at all. We enter life without prior rehearsal, confronted by countless first attempts. Without the gift of returning to the same crossroads again and again, we struggle to understand the consequences of our forking paths. If we were able to re-live the same life repeatedly, we might better grasp where each choice leads, armed with the knowledge gained from previous runs. Yet our existence unfolds in ignorance of the future’s shape, ensuring that every moment is shadowed by uncertainty.

In Kundera’s novel, Tomas–an accomplished physician in Prague–is initially a man defined by his personal creed: a life of broad conquests with many different women, yet never sharing a bed overnight. He is secure in his self-imposed rules, anchored to a vision of how his life must be. But suddenly, a radical accident of fate intrudes: he meets Tereza, a barmaid from a distant town, who unexpectedly follows him back to his Prague apartment. If his encounters with women were once light, playful affairs centered on physical exploration, Tereza’s arrival brings a quiet but distinctively heavy presence into his life, like a child floated downstream in a basket, suddenly deposited at his doorstep.

As a result, Tomas experiences a gradual yet profound transformation. His carefully constructed identity–an identity anchored in his skill as a physician and his belief in pursuing ever-new erotic conquests–starts to yield beneath the weight of Tereza’s presence. Chance and coincidence pull him toward previously unthinkable paths, including relinquishing his medical career under a repressive regime and drifting toward an uncertain future. Life, once strictly governed by his chosen “necessities”, now becomes increasingly steered by accidental forces that erode the illusion of predetermined meaning.

Does Kundera then simply argue, as his title might suggest, that everything is ultimately weightless and inconsequential, rendering the idea of “how we must live” a kind of hollow fantasy? Not quite. One of the novel’s most intriguing aspects lies in Tereza herself. She is a character who seeks patterns of inevitability within life’s randomness–interpreting repeated “coincidences,” like certain musical motifs, recurrent numbers, or favorite books, as signs of underlying necessity. By noticing recurring patterns, she converts the accidental into something that feels fated, as though chance were, through its repetition, solidifying into a subtle inevitability.

In so doing, Kundera refrains from handing us a simplistic verdict. Instead, he draws our attention to the delicate interplay between necessity and chance. If we accept these repeated accidents as meaningful signs, do they not crystallize into something like destiny? Conversely, if we adopt a more flexible mindset–acknowledging that life overflows with unknown variables–then even the heaviest-seeming convictions can begin to feel light and provisional. Kundera suggests we need not stand rigidly on one side of the scale. We can maintain a certain gracefulness amid life’s unknowable complexities, understanding that neither staunch adherence to a singular value nor complete surrender to randomness will ever deliver total certainty. The world remains in flux, and the challenge is to determine whether, and how, we can live comfortably within this ambiguous interplay of forces.

In the end, life does not grant us perfect knowledge or endless rehearsal. We cannot always grasp the long-term outcomes of our actions, nor can we fully control the accidents that befall us. Kundera’s narrative invites us to consider whether we can embrace the inescapable mixture of weight and lightness, destiny and chance–recognizing that existence may require neither rigid dogma nor unbounded frivolity, but a thoughtful, open-minded engagement with the mystery of being.