The Unbearable Lightness of Being

(I've been thinking lately about a newly revealed fact about myself [by Hopkins and Wystan, separately]: I like things that are "overwrought." [I don't understand, exactly, why this word is pejorative, and why we can't just say, "greatly wrought" or "appropriately wrought."])

I liked this movie very much (and wrote about it here), and so Stearns got me the book for my birthday.

This book is told in the most unbelievably dry tone ever. It's like a bored man recounting a series of events (although this may be due, in part, to the fact the it's in translation).

In his ever so dry tone, Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition--the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite 'novelistic' to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as 'fictive,' 'fabricated,' and 'untrue to life' into the word 'novelistic.' Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion."

"They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of life, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress."

I think that there's some truth to what he's saying here. I remember, during an internship I did in DC five years ago, there was a component that focused on Christian life together with the other interns. We sang hymns together, but there was one in particular that Lawrence and I loved, and thought summed up our experience at the internship well. It was called, "Come all Christians, be committed." Anyway, in a meaning-packed moment during our last gathering, Lawrence and I contrived to sing that song last of all (okay, so some lame students who didn't understand the arc of the experience, made us sing some other hymns, with less meaning, after that one; don't worry, Myrrh, it wasn't you!). The meaning of that hymn as the culmination of 4 months of Christian life together might have been pretty much in my head and Lawrence's, but, you know, if they made a movie out of our experience, they would have had to frame it within that hymn.

Kundera proceeds, throughout the novel, in his matter-of-fact, ironic tone to show this--through describing the lives of his characters, he shows how one event or characteristic (such as loyalty) could hold entirely different meanings for different characters, based on their past experiences.

He both denies that Anna Karenina is overwrought or fictive or untrue to life (not exactly synonyms, but close enough), and proceeds to show that the meaning of events is there only in each person's interior life (and can only be brought to the reader when he shares those internal events with the character). This is to say, the meaning of our lives is there through our interpretation of it.

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