Seemingly light and heavy, what is light?

Seemingly lightness and heaviness are intertwined in lightness and style, and "lightness of life" is like a translucent thin sand, which covers up the unspeakable "heaviness of life".

After reading Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Life (translated by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in August 20 14), I feel more and more that the author is not writing a novel, but that those words are purely building his philosophical system. This is like the famous French thinker Sartre. His novels The Fly, Nausea and The End of the Road are more like lectures and case studies of existentialism.

Similar to Sartre, Kundera should be defined as a philosopher more accurately.

Before the novel began, Kundera set a philosophical theme-the so-called dialectics of lightness and heaviness.

Parmenides, a Greek philosopher, put forward dialectics: light is affirmative, heavy is negative. Kundera borrowed parmenides's words and put forward an intriguing explanation: lightness is positive, which seems to conform to human nature and is expected by people; What matters is negativity. Feeling is not something that people are willing to bear, and it belongs to the outside of human nature.

So Kundera said straight away: "If eternal reincarnation is the heaviest burden, then our life, under this background, can show all its brilliance and lightness."

The three most important characters in the book-Thomas, Teresa and Sabine-appear one after another "lightly", trying to forget the "importance of life" in the joy of sex.

The "life weight" of the three characters is different. Thomas is a surgeon. He couldn't resist Teresa's request and bought Beethoven's records. He often plays "esmussein!" (it has to be like this! ), and at the same time, "the professional' esmussein' sucks his blood like a vampire."

The scalpel guided Thomas to find unknown lesions, and curiosity gradually became a mission. In addition to the mission based on career, what can be left in life? Thomas regards his wife and family as "the most important things in life". He proudly described 200 lovers in 25 years, including Teresa and Sabine. He filled the gap outside his professional mission with desire and love.

Teresa has been carrying her mother's pain since she was a child. After experiencing the unexpected event of pregnancy before marriage, her once attractive mother lost her last confidence in marriage and was depressed and desperate. At the same time, she was angry with Teresa who lost the initiative in her marriage. Mother's torture and curse on Teresa prematurely put the "weight of life" on this girl.

Teresa experiences the "weight of life" inherited by her mother in nightmares every day. She treated love timidly, and after sensitively discovering Thomas' debauchery, she almost extinguished the pursuit of love like her mother.

Incredibly, Teresa bravely picked up the camera after being exposed to news photography. 1968 When the Soviet Union invaded Prague (then the capital of Czechoslovakia), she used the lens to record the ruthless crushing of Soviet tanks and the revelers on the streets of Prague who were facing national subjugation.

The "lightness of life" captured by Teresa's lens took place in a harsh historical event. Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia. After experiencing social unrest in the 1960s and 1970s, he fled to France and finished The Unbearable Lightness of Life at 1984.

Kundera connects the historical picture of Czechoslovakia with Sabine, another main character in the book.

Sabine, who was rebellious by nature, became more and more arbitrary under his father's strict discipline. She ran away from home after her boyfriend was scolded by her father. Unfortunately, after his mother died, his father committed suicide in loneliness and despair. Sabine blamed herself for betraying her parents. The "weight of life" in her heart has been betrayed for a long time.

Sabin, who is no longer under control, has gained the freedom of artistic creation, but at the same time he has subverted everything and deviated from everything.

She no longer cares about her motherland and left Czechoslovakia long ago to live in Switzerland. She is no longer suppressed by ideology in school education, and regards "shouting the same slogan with one voice" as "a more essential and universal evil"; In her own art exhibition, she regarded the German reporter's question about slandering the Oriental Group as "kitsch"; Even when she was intimate with Thomas, she began to sleep with others. ...

Her (Sabin) tragedy is not because of heaviness, but because of lightness. What overwhelmed her was not the weight, but the unbearable lightness of life.

Freedom is not necessarily lightness.

Kundera creatively edited the biographies of three characters and the time sequence of plot development. Kundera, who used to be a painter and knew the beauty of art, seemed to paint on the page with a brush, with free brushstrokes and handy hands.

However, the expression of sadness and sadness is so heavy and desperate. Everyone in the book seems to be struggling to choose in different worlds and wandering painfully.

Seemingly lightness and heaviness are intertwined in lightness and style, and "lightness of life" is like a translucent thin sand, which covers up the unspeakable "heaviness of life".