The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Here, the narrator recalls Tomáš, whom he has been thinking about for many years, but whose life only comes into focus through the lens of the question of lightness versus weight. The narrator begins Tomáš’s story three weeks after a short trip to a provincial town outside of Prague, where he meets a waitress named Tereza. Ten days after he returns to Prague, Tereza comes to see him. The two immediately sleep together, and shortly thereafter Tereza comes down with the flu. She stays with Tomáš for one week and then returns home. During her illness, Tomáš had been overcome with a sudden and, for him, unusual love for Tereza. After Tereza leaves, Tomáš deliberates over whether to call her back to Prague. He frets until he realizes that indecision is perfectly natural, for having nothing with which to compare our lives (as we live them only once and cannot compare them with previous or future versions of ourselves), we can never truly know what we want or which course of action is indeed the best. He sums this up with the German adage “Einmal ist keinmal”: “What happens but once, might not as well have happened at all” (8).

Several days later, Tomáš receives a call from Tereza. Tereza has returned to Prague. He picks her up at the train station, where she is waiting for him with a bulky copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina under her arm and a large suitcase. Tomáš realizes that this suitcase contains all her possessions, and that he has just agreed to join their lives together. He brings her to his apartment and, although he’d sworn off serious romantic relationships, he moves Tereza in.

Happily divorced, Tomáš lives by a credo that he calls the “rule of threes” (12). He will see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or maintain a relationship with one woman over the years, but only see her once every three months. His favorite of these “erotic friendships,” as he terms them, is Sabina, a woman who is so comfortable with their unorthodox liaisons that she helps Tereza find a job in Prague.

In spite of his love for Tereza, Tomáš does not put an end to his erotic friendships. Tereza has a dream one night about Tomáš and Sabina, and Tomáš realizes that Tereza has been reading his private correspondence. Sabina had written to him very recently, and it is this letter that Tereza’s dream recalls.

The narrator discusses the word “compassion,” which has varying derivations across language families. Languages derived from Latin form the word by combining a prefix meaning “with” and a root meaning “suffering.” Other language groupings, including Germanic and Slavic tongues, form the word compassion by combining a (roughly) equivalent prefix with the word for “feeling.” The narrator argues that in languages whose word for compassion derives from the idea of suffering, “compassion” suggests that it is not possible to idly bear witness to suffering. This is akin to pity, a word that “connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer” (20). In languages that form the word with a root meaning feeling, Czech included, the narrator understands the word to have a different nuance: It “means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune, but also to feel with him any emotion—joy, anxiety, happiness, pain” (20). Although the narrator contends that Tereza’s act of snooping through Tomáš’s correspondence was morally remiss, he argues that Tomáš (a native speaker of Czech) responded with compassion, in the sense of “co-feeling.” He was able to empathize with her feelings of betrayal.

Tomáš remains unfaithful to Tereza. Two years pass during which his philandering continues to erode Tereza’s confidence and well-being. Because he knows that his affairs cause her such great pain, he endeavors to hide them from her, but he is rarely successful.

Tomáš and Tereza marry, and they adopt a puppy whom they name Karenin. Tomáš hopes that Karenin will provide Tereza with another outlet for her love and energy and that with a dog to take care of, she will worry less about Tomáš and his infidelities. Wanting to communicate to Tereza that the dog is hers more than his, he suggests a name taken from the book Tereza had under her arm when she arrived in Prague, Anna Karenina. Although Tereza suggests naming the female dog Anna, after the novel’s female protagonist, Tomáš balks: The dog is too ugly to be named after a woman as beautiful and urbane as Anna Karenina. He suggests her funny-looking, ineffectual husband instead.

In August of 1968, Czechoslovakia is occupied by Russians tanks, and a friend of Tomáš’s who runs a hospital in Zurich offers him a position. Tomáš is sure that Tereza will want to remain in Prague: The Russian occupation has provided her with an unprecedented opportunity to make a difference as a photographer. She spends countless hours photographing the invaders and their tanks, and her images appear in print. She is, however, amenable to emigration, and Tomáš realizes that because of his infidelities, she has never truly been happy in Prague.

In Switzerland, Tomáš continues his affair with Sabina, who has herself moved to Geneva. Because his infidelity has continued, Tereza continues to have her nightmares, and after only six or seven months, she returns to Prague, explaining to Tomáš in a letter why she could not stay. Initially, Tomáš feels relief. He decides that the seven years he spent with Tereza were burdensome, and that although he loved her, in her absence he feels a distinct, Parmenidean lightness. This euphoria, however, is short-lived. It takes mere days for Tereza to return to his thoughts, and he struggles to concentrate at work because he can do little other than fixate on her absence. He feels a deep sense of compassion for her and realizes that “nothing is heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone” (31). Tomáš decides to return to Tereza. Offended, his friend at the hospital asks him why he would choose to return to a Czechoslovakia that, firmly back under the control of Russia, might not be safe for him. He responds with the German “Es muss sein!” a refrain from a Beethoven quartet that translates to “It must be.”

Back in Prague, Tereza sleeps soundly, but Tomáš is kept up at night by the noise of Russian planes overhead. Tossing and turning one night, he recalls Tereza once telling him that had she not married him, she might very well have married one of his colleagues. He realizes that “It must be” is not a particularly apt framework through which to understand life’s events. A series of coincidences had brought him into contact with Tereza, and had only one of those events had been altered, they very well might have ended up with different partners. He settles upon “It could have easily been otherwise” as a more fitting axiom.