By: Muhammad Azzam Rakan Noor

Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead

There are many ways to connect with your surroundings, whether it is through physical experiences or deeper, your soul. But truly connecting with another soul requires lowering expectations and embracing the painful, yet transformative, process that comes with it. This was one of the first thoughts that came to mind when I finished reading Milan Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being.’ 

The juxtaposition between Nietzsche and Parmenides regarding the concept of “lightness” and “being” are perfectly incited in Kundera’s characters’ behaviors, responses, and thoughts. Tomas, a doctor with a brilliant mind and considered one of the proactive intellectuals during the Soviet occupation in Czechoslovakia, dealt with endless hunger of finding a connection and meaning within himself. His absurdity as well as his uncertainties of things he wanted in his life clash when he meets Tereza, a servant of a local hotel, struggling with dependency, desperate for a connection consisting of stability and assurance. 

“The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to earth, the more real and truthful they become.”

At first, I didn’t fully capture the weight of the “burden” that Kundera described in the writing, until I realized that it actually reflected in the complex and intense dynamics of Tomas and Tereza’s in their search for connection. The overanalyzed thoughts and insecurity that Kundera pictured in Tereza has confronted me on many levels. She let her thoughts lead her to act something she never expected, causing her to regret her actions and fall back to a person full of self-resentment. But regardless of it all, she didn’t do it for nothing – she did it for Tomas, driven by a longing to understand what it felt like to live as him, day after day.

The burden bagged by Tereza made her understand and pardon him–his indecisiveness and even his infidelity (not that I am trying to justify Tomas’ behavior). Here, Kundera seems to say, that once you love someone, you are connected to them and you would always support them no matter how wrong they treated you or what they’ve been doing to you. This is why Kundera states that the heavier the burden–the constant overthinking of Tereza in order to understand Tomas–, the more authentic her devotion and the more willful she is to find the answer or the “key” for Tomas’ attention and assurance, even though Tomas himself seemed as light as hydrogen, as avoidant as hydrophobic oil is toward water.

Despite the instability and the ambiguity of these characters, I have weirdly found something that I’ve never actually felt in any kind of novel before. Something that I can call the “banality” of placing expectations or hope in others, even those you think are your closest ones. My thought in calling it banality comes from how easily one can get disappointed and hurt by someone’s indecisiveness when it comes to wanting something. Another reason why I see it as banal is because how a connection can feel meaningless once both parties fully understand each other’s insecurities and flaws, just as Tereza knows Tomas’ fear of commitment as well as Tomas acknowledges her desperation for his stability.

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

Contrasting to my previous comment on banality, this sentence reflects how we live only once and we can’t compare our present life with our “paralel” life. Even though Tereza and Tomas’ connection lacks many things, they have managed to make peace and accept the reality and each other’s needs, although they surely know that both of them aren’t sure that they can reciprocate each other’s “demands”.

Overall, Kundera has effortlessly managed to say that, in the process of finding connections in human beings, it does not always have to be understood. To him, connection is an indefinite term that is always abstractly constructed.

“For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” 
This chef-d’oeuvre has also brought me to another perception of ‘connection’ in life; that we shall not waste our attempts to create connections in every moment, decision or step in life–whether it’s a connection within yourself or connection to people– and we should cherish as well as appreciate every connections that has passed through us, since life’s just a “phase of a transit”, tied to time that is short and irreversible.