I started reading Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being in e book form from before 2013, I think. I did remember some parts pretty well, especially the eerie dream of rows of naked cheering woman marching around a pool being shot to death, and his rather relatable depiction of 'vertigo': the insuperable urge to fall. I remember during a visit to a cliff on a beach somewhere I felt just that; the raging sea was too beautiful. Anyhow, beside those two I didn't quite remember where I left off so might as well read it again from the beginning. Definitely not a regrettable decision because the first few chapters was the best: more philosophy and being and less typical bizarre sex scenes by typical male authors (at this point I would probably despise men (authors, I hope) if I ever were to read another unrealistic fantasy treating female bodies—or, female as a whole, as mere 'glorified' objects: newsflash its still an object no matter how much you romanticize it so pls stop).
As I was saying, the beginning of the novel contains many reflections that I find particularly interesting (if not true): the ones regarding positive negative dichotomy and how weight and lightness don't exactly fit, how both are paradoxical and yet both ends of both spectrum. On weakness, on strength. On the importance of privacy and 'concentration camps' and somehow serves as reason as to why I have felt violated for quite several times throughout life. On how he talked about fortuitous and metaphors, one being related to Anna Karenina, and how one of the most memorable and terrifying thing I remember about it was how she became unbearable and I remember telling myself that being unbearable was the most dreadful, the lowest low, anyone can ever be (or in modern times, refer to Lorde's Liability). On "I"s, on how each lives are so intricate that whenever you get to see their reasons and motives they became, true, and true is one of the most important requirements for something to be valuable; beautiful, in my opinion, so, although I don't necessarily agree with justification of clearly faulty wrongdoings, I agree with us being very limited beings worth nothing but what is done in truth: truth in our thinking, our behavior and our intention. I hope I am making any sense beyond my very limited lexicon as to not create another dictionary of misunderstandings (although I find that particular passages written really superbly).
(Regarding the title, I also found a name or a term for my insatiable longing of freedom, and of being easy like sunday morning: unbearable urge to fall into weightlessness, to soar free out of touch with reality.)
One of the most memorable passages of the novel (or what I concluded as a collection of essays connected by/starring four protagonists/antagonists) is this:
Indeed, the whole book is filled with quotable passages and superbly written monologues, but subjectively, this particular quote reserves as a reminder (and newfound reason) for the following story:“Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”
One of the earliest childhood memory (assuming that I have forgotten most of my early elementary school memories before fourth grade) of mine was having this recurring thought about existence. I was always a religious child and as long as I remembered I was always on Sunday school every single week. My family had dinner together most of the night and our rice cooker was placed faraway from our dining table/room, so I had to walk a few steps, no more than twenty, to the rice cooker placed on a low toddler chair, painted bright red and dark evergreen. It has become so much of a habit—walking, stooping down to the rice cooker, pressing the button for it to open, scooping some rice, closing the lid, putting away the ladle, walking back—that I can almost still recall the sound of the lid opening and closing.
In between those series of activities, as if serving as a reminder, I would think of what if the world as it is now doesn't exist. Not even in the 'what if I die what will the earth be like' kind of non existent, but as in what if we, the world, earth, heaven, hell, have never even existed in the first place? How empty, how eternally helpless, hopeless would it feel? How relieving, how free it would feel, of constantly existing, but then again would we be able to feel the emptiness should we cease to exist? And at the end of those series of thinking would be limitless pitch black everything. I somehow had two versions of this thinking, the other one during my evening bath embraced by my parents' frigid sunken bathtub painted dark indigo, inside their large blue ceramic tiled bathroom.
I don't quite remember how old I was back then or how long ago was then, but hitherto I still feel the limitless blackness every now and then: like a lost sputnik, detached, heading nowhere in particular, floating, endlessly in an empty and cold black, very much alive but very, very fatigued. Overwrought.
It's already ten minutes to Monday.