You Can’t Write The Unbearable Lightness of Being Without Sleeping With Ten People First

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

I will say it. If Kundera had not slept with ten women, he could not have written this book.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is Milan Kundera’s best-known novel. Published in 1984, it put him on the world literary stage in one stroke, and for years he was rumored to be a favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is a philosophical novel, and what it is about is the pair of questions, lightness and weight. I read half of it, and a few days ago I happened to talk about it with a friend who has similar experience, so I wrote down these reading notes. What follows may contain NSFW text, not suitable for reading at work.

One-night stands are the lightness of being. No staying over, no asking about tomorrow, no claims on the other person’s life or freedom. The novel’s male protagonist, Tomas, gave this system a name, erotic friendship, with only one rule: keep love out of it.

First, the two of them. Tomas is a Prague surgeon, divorced, with countless lovers, living a life as clean as his system: women may come through his door, but they may not wake up in his bed. Tereza is a waitress from a small town who dragged a heavy suitcase into his home and later became his wife. She is his exact opposite. He can cut sex apart from love; she cannot. For her, body and soul are one thing, going to bed with someone means handing over everything, and sex without love is betrayal.

The cost lands entirely on her. After the marriage his lovers never stopped, and she had nightmares night after night, dreaming she was mixed into a crowd of naked women marching around a swimming pool while Tomas stood above, watching. She felt her body was no different from anyone else’s in his eyes. She tried sleeping with an engineer, to prove that sex without love was nothing, and it broke her even more.

Marriage, birth, and death are the weight of being. Irrevocable, unrepeatable. Light things repeated ten thousand times are still light; heavy things only have to come down once, and a life changes course.

The evidence I suspect is not in the plot, it is in a metaphor. Kundera wrote that making love to a woman and sleeping with a woman are two desires that are not only different but almost opposite. Love does not show itself as the desire to make love to someone, that desire can point at countless women; love shows itself as the desire to sleep beside one person, and that desire points at one person only.

That distinction cannot be invented. Someone who has never woken up in many beds cannot write “making love is light”; someone who has never had the one person he wanted to stay the night cannot write “sleeping together is weight”. His descriptions are accurate enough to offend, accurate enough that you feel it is his own inventory.

There is one flaw the book writes through and through: lightness, repeated too much, goes bland. A person who has a choice every day ends up feeling nothing for anything. I keep thinking that most of life is bland, boring, even painful anyway. Lightness can only season; it cannot be the main course.

That is why the strongest thing about this book is that it writes lightness so accurately, yet its landing point is weight. To write the heaviest things, marriage, betrayal, staying the night, death, so they float up like feathers, the author must first have weighed them in his own hands.

I was just thinking: to understand Kundera’s questions, reading and talking are both useless. You either go talk with Tomas, or you go talk with Tereza. The best way is to make love with them. Make love with Tomas, and you understand what lightness is; make love with Tereza, and you understand what weight is.

Lifting the heavy as if it were light. Something like that.

Finally, I recommend that everyone go read this book, and practice what is in it. Only then can you truly understand the real flavor of life (anyways, stay safe!! and don’t go getting yourself killed in the process).