I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
From The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera:
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 “Active,” “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 love, 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.
Nietzsche would approve of this perspective, as he thought you should live your live with great style and beauty, with attention to aesthetics, as though it were a a great novel and you the protagonist.
But do people really compose their lives like this? In theory, it’s a nice idea. In reality, I suspect most lives are much more mundane.
And anyway, this idea is not the central one in Kundera’s novel, but still it is my entry point for today.
My difficulties reading unbearable lightness
Unbearable Lightness was published in 1984, and I’ve heard about it again and again. But I never attempted to read it until now.
I found it easy to start reading and difficult to continue. Kundera repeatedly stops the story, changes narrative perspective from one character to another, circles backwards, and introduces philosophical positions. The characters are at once experiments and exemplars of different philosophies of life.
In the story, Tomas tests lightness and erotic freedom. Tereza seeks weight meaning. Sabina looks to shed attachments. Franz attempts to live with idealism and grandeur. As they each quest for the right way to live they find that the opposite may be what they need.
Kundera’s use of different characters to express different philosophies reminds me of Kierkegaard’s use of different mouthpieces, for example in Either/Or, in which the aesthetic and the ethical lives are contrasted.
And I notice that Kundera’s character of Tomas is, in some ways, expressing Kierkegaard’s aesthetic life while Tereza demands meaning and commitment, as in Kierkegaard’s ethical life.
In both cases, the writers dramatize philosophy and make clear that there are no simplistic answers: should one live with lightness or heaviness? Aesthetics or ethics?
Again, I realize that straight up philosophical nonfiction prose is not adequate to expressing the subtleties and difficulties of how to live a life well. Novels (or partly fictionalized philosophical treatises such as Either/Or) can say things with more doubt, with more complexities, via examples and roundaboutness.
I think I’d like to write a novel.