Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Milan Kundera Making the reading experience fun! Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster. Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides: *Chapter-by-chapter analysis *Explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols *A review quiz and essay topicsLively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers
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What Hacker News says
- I really liked "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera because of the style of writing and not because of the story. The author goes on a lot of thought-provoking philosophical tangents. Here's an example from the very beginning of the book:
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?
- Oh, sure!
1. The Book of Disquiet by Bernardo Soares/Fernando Pessoa ("Livro do Desassossego" in the original Portuguese)
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
4. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
5. (As mentioned) The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
It doesn't make much sense, but between 1. and 2. I'd put all of the currently known poetry and prose by Álvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro, and Ricardo Reis (in that order). I have a 3-book collection with this.
- "A Canticle For Leibowitz"; "The Stranger"; "The Fall"; "Childhood's End"; "Riddley Walker"; "The Martian Chronicles"; "The Sea of Tranquillity"; "Animal Farm"; "Catch 22"; "The Catcher in the Rye"; "A Clockwork Orange"; "Dr. Strangelove"; "To Kill A Mockingbird"; "The Little Prince"; "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"; "Lord of the Flies"; "Charlotte's Web"; "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"; "All Quiet on the Western Front"; "The World According to Garp"; "Invisible Man"; "Flowers for Algernon"; "Sophie's Choice"; "The Road"; "All the Light We Cannot See"; "The Goldfinch"; "Atonement"; "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time"
- “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is just fantastic. I think it’s well worth your time. I’ve read it a few times now. With each subsequent read at a different point in my life, it’s been interesting to see new insights and perspectives emerge. If you end liking it, another one from Kundera I particularly enjoyed was “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”.
- Summer Meditations deeply affected me as a student studying politics. Unbearable Lightness of being had a similar effect on me a few years later.
- While reading it it felt like the author of this article had an axe to grind. His bitterness towards Havel felt palpable, and some quick googling shows that he's definitely not a neutral party:
As far back as 2014, when he was _First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs_ he was criticizing Havel and his policies from a policy standpoint: https://www.praguepost.com/czech-news/czech-foreign-policy-a...
He pitches the issues between Havel and Kundera as ideological, and representative:
Their exchange reflected the fault line between democratic-socialist and liberal intellectuals: Kundera argued for a new model of society that would be free and fair, avoiding the vices of both Western capitalism and Eastern European authoritarianism; Havel defended Western capitalism as the only desirable model, needing fine tuning, but no major revision.
And his position on the ideological battle is quite clear in the book he published titled Budoucnost Levice bez Liberalismu_ (The future of the left without liberalism).
This isn't to say the article isn't accurate or interesting. (I loved both Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being; and Havel's Summer Meditations). But I think it's useful context, and I'm definitely taking its contents with a pinch of salt, and double checking the falsifiable claims therein.
