If you ask Milan Kundera, to be alive is to feel the extreme weightiness of existence.
Yeah, we know.
Weight comes to us in many forms: past lives, sexuality, mortality, angst, self-hatred, grief. None of this is pleasant, and it's generally so complex that we'd rather just chuck all the baggage and live, weightless, in a dream world.
But there's a price to pay for living a life without weight. It means that we deny the essence of our existence and the bulk of our stories, both personal and historical. It also means that we embrace forgetting, denying ourselves the journey inward to explore our own internal landscapes.
It's that lack that Kundera speaks of in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting when he's missing his dad or when he talks about Tamina beginning to forget her husband's face—a forgetting that threatens to erase whole chunks of existence.
And, yeah, that's pretty heavy.
Questions About Life, Consciousness, and Existence
- Why does Kundera think the "internal infinitude" is more important than the external one?
- How do Tamina and Kundera view death? In what way are their views different from Mann's and Novalis' views on the subject?
- Why does Kundera believe that laughter originally belonged to the devil?
- What is the function of poetry, according to Petrarch? To Lermontov? What about to Kundera?
Chew on This
Having "baggage" isn't really a bad thing in Kundera's world.
Laughter can't be trusted because we can never know the origin of it. We can never know if it's bad or good.