Click on Watch on YouTube to watch the full-length movie
It's a wet and grey morning and I'm glad I got some lawn-mowing done yesterday. Listening to the radio while having my first cup of tea of the day, I hear someone talk about someone who was only famous for being famous say, "His father died when he was seven years old", which seems like a biological impossibility. I mean, my father was 76 when he died.
Maybe it's because I used to be a German or because I am a pedant - or maybe because of both - but these imprecisions in the English language grate on me. Which makes reading books like "Unbearable Lightness Of Being", written in Czech and then translated into English, so much more fun. The writer, Milan Kundera, finds the insignificance of our lives - the unbearable lightness of being - unbearable and yet, if we act as if our actions are eternally important, then the heaviness of our actions and choices would crush us under their weight.
Here are some quotes:
“And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.” [I can relate to that.]
“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.” [Yes, I can relate to that, too.]
“There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, 'sketch' is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.”
“Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”
“Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.” [Indeed!]
“Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.” [I think we all can relate to that one.]
“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.” [Yes, yes, yes!]
If you read deeply enough into this novel you'll start to think, "He’s talking about me!"
Anyway, they also turned the book into a titillating - with emphasis on the first three letters! - movie. I prefer the book! And a cup of tea!
