What is meaning of existence? That may be the question we’ve all asked ourselves at some point in our lives. Kundera, just like the rest of us all, ask the same question in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. However, he further examines the state of existence and the cause of our suffering using contrastive analysis of lightness and weight. For Kundera, existence is never what has already happened, what is happening now or what will happen in the future. It contains all the possibilities in our lives. When facing poles in our lives—lightness and weight, soul and body, loyalty and betrayal—the choice that people make, with the price of our own lives, was merely one possibility of existence.
The opposition of lightness and weight is an analogy Kundea uses to express the state of existence. It is one of the many pairs of poles in our lives but the one that expresses people’s different degrees of dependence on the external world and the different levels of sense of existence. It truly captures the reason why people suffer and struggle in life—only being able to choose one possibility when a meaningful existence is the one that contains all possibilities. And thus it is a fair comparison to use lightness and weight for categorizing existence.
According to the fact that “we all need someone to look at us” (269), Kundera divided people into four categories based on “the kind of look they wish to live under” (269). The first kind, yearn for “the look of the public” (269), like singers and politicians, while the second the category “is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes” (270). Tereza and Tomas belong to the third category who need to be seen by their loved ones (270). The last category, according to Kundera, contains those who live in the “imaginary eyes” (270). It is not hard to see that these four category ranks according to the degree of dependence on the external world, in other words, from heavy to light.
It seem to me that Sabina does not belong to any of the four categories above—she does not have any attachment to anything and thus does not rely on the external world at all. She constantly chases after one betrayal after another—she belongs to the fifth category in which people pursue absolute emptiness. Sabina is such a representative of this category. She does whatever she favors, loves and hates freely, and enjoys people coming and leaving her life—she could not care less. People who live this way almost achieve the state of nihility or nonexistence. They seem to live the lightest lives with no burdens. Constant betrayal and rebellion of kitsch is the idea of their lives—they establish their egos through betrayals and thus become the most self-centered among all.
But are they really living the lightest life? “One could betray one’s parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, love were gone—what was left to betray?” (122). The betrayals will come to an end, and that end is lightness, but empty lightness with no meaning. In the novel, Sabina asked herself the question “What if that emptiness was the goal of all her betrayals?”(122). Yes, she betrayed everything she could have betrayed but did she escape from the weight she hated? Isn’t she still a normal women who was played by men? Doesn’t she also want that peaceful, happy life along her journey of betrayals? Isn’t the end of her betrayals—the emptiness—the most heavy of all? The burden that the meaningless existence brings her is heavier than all other weight.
In fact, though Kundera categorizes existence into these groups, human being is just too complex a creature that one may not necessarily belongs to one category in his or her life. It is an undeniable fact that we only live once and there is no turning back in time. Therefore we are forced to choose only one possibility and sacrifice others. However, when thousands and thousands choices layered up, it often turns out that the result is not what we choose in the beginning. This applies to Sabina, as well as Tomas, Tereza and us all.
Tomas, a man who was happily enjoying his free bachelor life with freedom and lightness, met Tereza and then the heaviest emotion, love, just stoke him down. Since then, every casual became a burden just like his love for Tereza—he thought about his love for her when he was supposed to be light, but he kept his sexual relationships with different mistresses when he was supposed to take the weight and be loyal. He constantly struggled between the choice of lightness and weight.
After Tomas met Tereza, he chose to marry her and marry her heavy suitcase. But then his choice of meeting Sabina and continue his casual sex as usual led to Tereza’s departure, which gives him back the lightness of being—he became the person who can just enjoy himself with no attachment. However, it was only five days after that he chose weight again—he decided to go back to Prague to be with Tereza and to embrace his love for her. He returned from the lightness to the heavy life and it seemed like he wanted to end this struggle between sex and love, or in other words, lightness and weight with a period. But right after he said “Es muss sein! (It must be!)” (33), “he began to doubt” (33). When he realized his love was built on chance, he reached the conclusion that “the love story of his life exemplified not ‘Es muss sein!’ (It must be so), but rather ‘Es Konnte auch anders sein’ (It could just as well be otherwise)” (35). Tomans’ life, again, became a light one from the heavy must-be situation.
Tomas spend his whole life struggling between lightness and weight—the meaning of his existence. He exhausted all his energy in the countless transitions between and crashes of lightness and weight trying to find an answer but ended up with none. Tereza went through a very similar mechanism though from a different perspective.
From the very beginning, Tereza was this girl who was loyal and committed, who, in some sense, was as innocent as a child. She yearned for a life of loyal love, a life in which soul and body can never be separated. She believed so deeply that this will bring her happiness—her choice was weight. However, when she was almost desperate and decided the try the light lifestyle, she found herself capable of separating her soul and body. Though she had a taste of lightness of existence, the fact that her fantasy since childhood crashed brought her even worse nightmares—her life became even heavier. The constant struggle she went through was just like Tomas’ pain. They swing between lightness and weight and suffer from doing so.
Therefore, lightness and weight do capture the state of existence for they represent not only the opposition in people’s life, but also the choice of how much to depend on the external world. However, life is but once—“What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all” (8). The linearity of life forces people to constantly make choices. Therefore, in the opposition of lightness and weight, the forced sswing of their choices ultimately causes the pain and tortures people have to suffer from. Whatever category one chooses, lightness or weight, the meaning of his or her existence coming with this choice will vanish in and digested by the horrible “Einmal ist keinmal”. Existence is meaningful when it contains different possibilities, but the choice between lightness and weight make one’s life meaningless for all a person has is only one possibility. The opposition of lightness and weight captures this dilemma of existence so accurately that it gives the basic circumstance which makes human existence even possible.
Kundera does give a hint of a possible solution of this dilemma, but soon denies it. For him, people have the ability to achieve the balance of lightness and weight when they love selflessly. Tereza’s relationship with Karenin was an example of such love. “It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Kerenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back” (297). According to Kundera, “perhaps the reason why we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and ask for nothing but his company” (297). When one loves another selflessly, he or she can reach both lightness and weight—there is no demand or dependence anymore, but one can fully devote oneself to the love.
However, this kind of selfless love is unrealistic in a sense that “no one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll” (298). In Tereza’s relationship with Karenin, Tereza was like a God, and by God I am not referring to the God in the Christian sense for Christian God does demand something (that people only worship him, etc.) Karenin listened to Tereza as if her words are truths and Tereza loved Karenin selflessly asking for nothing in return.
Nonetheless, the only reason that Tereza had a taste of the idyllic love is because Karenin was an animal who “surrounded Tereza and Tomas with a life based on repetition” (298) which a human being is not capable of achieving with another human being—“human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line” (298). I think Tereza had a moment of idyll with Tomas after they cut all their connections and dependence with the external world. But as we see in the ending of Tereza and Tomas, the temporary idyllic love they had soon vanished in the car accident that took both of their lives—the lightness became unbearable for their beings. And once again, the opposition of lightness and weight is proved to be the analogy that captures the eternal dilemma of existence and thus people’s struggle over the meaning of existence.
The ultimate result of our lives depends not only on one but tons of choices we made when we swing between lightness and weight. The fact that human life is a linear process with no turning back or second chances sets the fundamental tragic keynote for our existence. We see the meaning of existence as experiencing different possibilities within endless repetitions (or chances), but we just can’t achieve that. We are under the control of our own passion, the passion toward wanting more possibilities. Thus we struggle, hover and swing among choices of lightness and weight, and suffer because of doing so since whatever we choose, we will not be able to experience other possibilities, not to mention the fact that what we pursue may not be what we get in the end—life is ultimately tragic. Even the possible solution, to love selflessly, is unrealistic and temporary for human.
The tension between lightness and weight strike us again and again in our lives. Kundera seeks and captures this tension that causes the suffering and struggle, which he uses as an analogy for categorizing the existence and ingeniously summarizes as The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Words Cited
Kundera, Milan, and Michael Henry Heim. The Unbearable Lightness Of Being. New York: Harperperennial, 2009. Print.