Over the summer I read Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which felt to me as pretentious as the title of the book. I could not understand what could be the point of illustrating a married man’s physical affairs with multiple women in excruciating detail, including a departure from the main narrative to explain the choices made by one of his former mistresses. The writing choices and allusions to theoretical ideas, some original and some posited by philosophers whose names I can barely pronounce, made for a wonderful thought experiment until I could bear the vehicle of delivery (Tomas, the male nymphomaniac) no longer.
But if there’s one thing about me, I love a good controversy, and Kundera and his ideas provide more than ample material to justify having opinions when in want of opinions. And so after some digging, one GoodReads reviewer explained to me what I had missed in the book all along. They wrote, “Having only one life to live, makes the life choices difficult and onerous. It is also because of this very fact of living only one life that these life choices do not have much weight in the bigger picture. And it is this irony which causes the unbearable lightness of being.” The irony considered in regard to relationships begrudgingly prompts understanding of how some people feel motivated to make choices in favor—or disfavor—of the grass being greener elsewhere. Those motivations, shaped by the unique experiences and personalities that define our respective truths, cannot be imposed on one another. So while Tomas makes the choice, every single time, to sleep with a woman he has not slept with before, and his wife Tereza makes the choice to come home to him every night despite his hair smelling…unfamiliar odors, neither you nor I can will a change to their situation because none of us (Tomas and Tereza included) can tell you if there exists an alternative situation in which all parties feel wholly satisfied, because we cannot play out any other hypothetical and Tomas’ and Tereza’s current trajectory simultaneously.
We can observe a similar phenomenon in the relationship between Elizabeth Hardwick and famed American poet Robert Lowell. Hailed one of the most stylistic literary critics of her era and listed among renowned contemporaries such as Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and Mary McCarthy, Hardwick has been praised for her essays, indefatigable command of prose, and her bestseller, Sleepless Nights. Her infamous marriage with Lowell resulted in his leaving Hardwick after a European excursion to be with another woman, Caroline Blackwood, and publishing segments of Hardwick’s correspondence to him after learning about his infidelity (imagine you texted your ex you’re finding out that they cheated and then they posted screenshots of your shock to their story). According to biographer Cathy Curtis, the essayist was so taken up with Lowell’s brilliance that she stayed with him for a number of years and even got on as friends with him following his departure from his Blackwood. Hence we observe that in much the same way Tereza stays with Tomas, so does Hardwick with Lowell. Despite the many indiscretions committed by the heros, both women make the choices they feel would satisfy them the most, the insignificance of their own lives mirrored in their limited affordance of choices they can compare their decisions to.
A more unfortunate replication of the unbearable lightness can be witnessed in the lives of the women who loved Pablo Picasso. Anyone who knows anything about Picasso’s personal life knows he was, and please pardon the French, a complete asshole. Manipulative, deeply misogynistic, and emotionally abusive, Pablo took on a string of lovers over his lifetime, many of them generations younger than he – really, he makes Leonardo Dicaprio look like a family man. In fact, many of the people in his familial or romantic circle committed suicide, yet he was hailed, first and foremost, a genius (an opinion I hold in particular conviction: genius is a word reserved for men who have enough talent to supply evidence for its merit). Picasso had talent, no doubt. By age 16 he had mastered the skills and techniques of artists three to four times his age at minimum and thus had the rest of his—very long—life to create with wild abandon. But under the pretense of Genius, Picasso has been excused for over 90 years of horrifying behavior towards those he considered subordinate to his art, namely the women, in his life.
While Tomas exhibits limited signs of Genius compared to Picasso’s partially earned epithet, one can observe how the allure of brilliance, passion, or attraction, as exhibited by Hardwick and Tereza, play into love for a person whose treatment of the people around them results in repeated heartache. And such is the unbearable lightness. In the great mural of our lives, do we want to frame the incomplete picture of the object of our desires or leave, hoping the fortuitous events in our lives eclipse the seemingly insurmountable mark left by the people who first introduced color?
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