Musing #1

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

== ==

The novel's protagonist, Tomáš, finds himself obsessed with the idea of a lover he barely knows:

He had come to feel an inexplicable love for this all but complete stranger.

[...]

But was it love? ...Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? ...Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

The woman eventually becomes Tomáš's wife, which only further attests to the idea that the rightness of the rightest choice, though shrouded in uncertainty and the doubt at the outset, will uncloud in the lucidity of the hindsight.


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.

[...]

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera