What does Milan Kundera mean by “the unbearable lightness of being?
akannan Teacher Middle School Editor Emeritus Debater Expert Educator $(document).ready(function() { $(‘a.toggle_expert_titles’).click(function() { $(‘#show_expert_titles’).toggle(); return false; }); }); Kundera’s title of the work reflects a passage in which he sought to distinguish between “weight” and “lightness.” When he speaks of weight, he is speaking of the weight of our experiences, our memories. This weight defines who we are, what we do, and how we proceed. It is brought on by our choices in these domains. It is a part of us, but it is also crushing. We are pinned underneath it, as he says, and it is painful at times because weight usually is. At the opposite polarity is the notion of lightness, where we transcend our experiences and seek an “idyll where nightingales sing,” (to paraphrase from another Kundera work, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.) Lightness is a relinquishment of our weights, our experiences, our memories and is a state of beings where we are free to fl
