The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera, who is one of my favorite authors, passed away earlier this month. This post is to commemorate him.

Warning: The post contains spoilers on The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

 

I bought my copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being at Shakespeare and Company in Paris in the summer of 2013. I was a fourth year PhD student then in Lausanne and visiting Illegitimate Daughter. It was our first time hanging out in Paris together, which would later become the first of many. We had Shakespeare and Company in our list of places to see because it is one of the places Celine and Jesse visit in Before Sunset. I didn’t have a plan to buy a particular book, but I wanted to buy one to commemorate the visit, which I usually do whenever I visit a bookstore that I deem important for the first time. After almost an hour of roaming and chilling at the bookstore, The Unbearable Lightness of Being ended up being the choice, for no reason other than being one of those books that I thought I should probably read one day.

I didn’t read that book until shortly after I moved to San Jose in 2015. Whenever I was reading it during my daily commute to work using the Light Rail in San Jose, it felt like drinking water after being thirsty for a very long time. I later read it again shortly after I moved to Copenhagen in 2018, and parts of it I read again and again in my first year there.

 

The book has three main characters: Tomáš, Tereza, and Sabina.

Sabina was the character that I was the most drawn to. She was on her own unlike Tomáš and Tereza who were a couple. She kept moving from place to place, whereas Tomáš and Tereza returned to Prague. I related to her unenthusiasm about the events that aim to create a nationality-based community for people living abroad. Toward the end, she created an alternative family for herself, but on a shaky foundation. …

But, most importantly, the first chapter where she is the character of focus, which is the third part of the book titled “Words Misunderstood” was one of the best things I had ever read in my life.

“Words Misunderstood” centers on the concept of words having different meanings to different people based on their background. This isn’t a new concept. Some may claim it is an obvious one. On the other hand, Milan Kundera’s rendition of this concept is the most beautiful one I have ever encountered. At one point, he relates it to composing, I assume because of his scholarly training in musicology. We form our life-compositions with people who enter our lives early on. Thus, we form a common set of words and gestures with them. When we meet people later in life, especially the ones who come from very different backgrounds, the same words and gestures may conflict or require over-explanation. In contrast, when you meet a good old friend, even after years of absence, things flow with ease thanks to our shared language/composition. On the other hand, he also mentions the possibility of creating a new composition with the people who enter our lives later if one makes the necessary effort.

 

“While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Part 3: Words Misunderstood

 

Lausanne was the first place I moved to that didn’t have the sea. Switzerland doesn’t have sea. It has beautiful mountains and lakes. That is what is engraved in the locals and many foreigners that live there. I, on the other hand, lived the first 21 years of my life in coastal cities seeing the sea almost every day. When I traveled, it was also mostly to other coastal cities. The sea was the most consistent part of my life. I knew the world is a lot more than its coasts, and the sea isn’t a big part of many people’s lives, but I had never internalized that fact before I moved to Switzerland. In Switzerland, the sea wasn’t a big deal. Or the relation to the water was centered around water sports, creating a more active state when interacting with the water as opposed to experiencing it as is. In return, I didn’t care that much for their beautiful mountains, skiing, or hiking. Turkey’s coast also has mountains, but to me the mountains came as an attachment to the sea. Later in life, I adjusted my composition to appreciate the beauty of the mountains and enjoy hiking with friends. That composition hasn’t had a place for skiing, though, and I don’t expect that it ever will. And I am afraid one day I will face deportation from Europe because I don’t hike enough.

I know this example may sound like a first-world problem. Last month I wrote about way more serious challenges people face when they move abroad. Especially in the context of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the characters move abroad to escape the political climate in their home country. But even if you have the best conditions in your life abroad, seemingly very frivolous things can create a divide between you and the other people. With many words misunderstood the divide deepens. This is why it is very challenging to create strong bonds with local people when you live abroad unless both sides are willing to put the energy to create a common language/composition.

 

“Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Part 2: Soul & Body

 

The second part of the book titled “Body & Soul”, which focuses on Tereza, touches on the theme of living abroad as well, especially when your country of origin is the politically more complicated and socio-economically less privileged one compared to the country that you moved to. You end up being subjected to the top-down or black-and-white views of the people about you and your country. That contributes to the deepening of the divide substantially. In the book, our characters first move to Switzerland from Czechoslovakia. Someone in Switzerland shames Tereza for being dependent on Tomáš’s money.

I remember once a Frenchman I met at a wedding telling me “You can feel free now that you live abroad” when we were discussing issues related to my gender in Turkey. I was taken aback by that statement. How did he get to that conclusion? Sure, we were discussing serious issues women face in my home country, but how did he make this projection to freedom and the lives of all the Turkish women? How did he project that onto my life? Did I give him this impression? Or was this his entitlement making such bold statements about the lives of people he knew very little of? Did he not know that there are also many challenges women face in his own country, in Europe, in USA …? Did he not realize that my residence in Europe/US depended on my job, which by default made me less free than most people around me, and I lacked the very strong support system I had in Turkey when I was abroad? Plus, if I go down the rabbit hole, was anyone really “free”?

 

Milan Kundera was exiled to France from his homeland Czechoslovakia in 1975. He lived the rest of his life in France. He knew what it meant to live abroad, to come from a politically complex country, and to be persecuted for one’s ideas. I admire and appreciate him for analyzing concepts such as identity, misuse of political power, beauty, sex … using the almost archetypical characters he creates, but without undermining, overgeneralizing, or creating a caricature of those characters, so they all feel very human at the same time.

 

I would like to end this post by acknowledging the people who have contributed to forming the core of my composition early on back when I still lived in Turkey and who have been generous with me as I lived abroad so that I can keep enrichen my composition later in life. It is hard to list them all, but they are the ones that frequently appear in this blog. Thank you, and I love you!

 

P.S. Special thanks to Illegitimate Daughter for remembering the dates of our visit to Shakespeare and Company.