City of Symbols

“If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. This is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).” ~Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This impossibly burdened statement occurs on the fourth page of Milan Kundera’s brilliant, famous novel. Throughout the entire text he unabashedly uses his characters, his actions, his city, weaving them blatantly into a symbolic battle between the unbearable weight of being and the unbearable lightness of it. It all centers on this statement and the page following it, in which he poses the question, is it better to be light than to be heavy?
This question is uniquely suited to Prague. In all of our classes, the dark weight of the Czech Republic’s communist past crops up eternally. Though the country grows ever closer to the culture and standards of living of the West, its past cannot but show its face. In my last post, I referred to the age of Prague pressing in on me constantly. I was not referring to one of its most traumatic periods, that of the communist era, The Unbearable Lightness of Being has opened my eyes to a weight that rests on the people the way the city’s vast age rests on its buildings and streets.
Kundera’s central characters are a pair of lovers with infinitely different attitudes towards life. Tereza is constantly trying to escape her past and thrust herself into the better light of somewhere else. Tomas revels in his own debauchery, condescending towards the world from his height of womanizer and doctor. Yet, they are desperately in love with each other, though each hurts the other frequently until the end of their lives. Their lives and the lives of the people surrounding them, including Tomas’s long-term mistress Sabina and her lover after Tomas, Franz, make up the plot, but throughout the story, each character is repeatedly forced into Kundera’s dilemma of whether to treat their lives at that moment with lightness or with weight. Suffice it to say that no matter the choice, their stories end with at least a modicum of tragedy. The Czech people have a peculiar sense of humor, often relying on elaborate practical jokes and fantasies and incredible amounts of irony to justify the patterns of their lives, and in many ways, this book is Kundera’s joke on the Czech era of communism. He ends the second to last part of the book (it is divided into seven parts), with a list of how several of the characters’ ends are characterized by kitsch, a word that in English implies a lightness of being but Kundera transforms into a dangerously weighty thing in the wrong hands:
“What remains of Tomas?
An inscription reading HE WANTED THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH.
What remains of Beethoven?
A frown, an improbable mane, and a somber voice intoning ‘Es muss sein!’
What remains of Franz?
An inscription reading A RETURN AFTER LONG WANDERINGS.
And so on and so forth. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.” (270)

I am desperately afraid of kitsch. I sometimes feel like an object of kitsch being here. In this place I feel my own unbearable lightness of being.