Milan kundera

Es muss sein! 
and forgot it the moment 
they left for home every evening. This was the first time he had felt that blissful 
indifference. Whenever anything went wrong on the operating table, he would be 
despondent and unable to sleep. He would even lose his taste for women. The 
Es 
muss sein! 
of his profession had been like a vampire sucking his blood. 
Now he roamed the streets of Prague with brush and pole, feeling ten years younger. 
The salesgirls all called him doctor (the Prague bush telegraph was working better than 
ever) and asked his advice about their colds, aching backs, and irregular periods. They 
seemed almost embarrassed to watch him douse the glass with water, fit the brush on 
the end of the pole, and start washing. If they could have left their customers alone in 
the shops, they would surely have grabbed the pole from his hands and washed the 
windows for him. 
Most of Tomas's orders came from large shops, but his boss sent him out to private 
customers, too. People were still reacting to the mass persecution of Czech 
intellectuals with the euphoria of solidarity, and when his former patients found out that 
Tomas was washing windows for a living, they would phone in and order him by name. 
Then they would greet him with a bottle of champagne or slivovitz, sign for thirteen win-
dows on the order slip, and chat with him for two hours, drinking his health all the while. 
Tomas would move on to his next flat or shop in a capital mood. While the families of 
Russian officers settled in throughout the land and radios intoned ominous reports of 
police functionaries who had replaced cashiered broadcasters, Tomas reeled through 
the streets of Prague from one glass of wine to the next like someone going from party 
to party. It was his grand holiday. 
He had reverted to his bachelor existence. Tereza was suddenly out of his life. The only 
times he saw her were when she came back from the bar late at night and he woke 
befuddled from a half-sleep, and in the morning, when she was the befuddled one and 
he was hurrying off to work. Each workday, he had sixteen hours to himself, an 
unexpected field of freedom. And from Tomas's early youth that had meant women. 
When his friends asked him how many women he had had in his life, he would try to 
evade the question, and when they pressed him further he would say, Well, two 
hundred, give or take a few. The envious among them accused him of stretching the 
truth. That's not so many, he said by way of self-defense. I've been involved with 
women for about twenty-five years now. Divide two hundred by twenty-five and you'll 
see it comes to only eight or so new women a year. That's not so many, is it?
But setting up house with Tereza cramped his style. Because of the organizational 
difficulties it entailed, he had been forced to relegate his erotic activities to a narrow 
strip of time (between the operating room and home) which, though he had used it 
intensively (as a mountain farmer tills his narrow plot for all it is worth), was nothing like 
the sixteen hours that now had suddenly been bestowed on him. (I say sixteen hours 
because the eight hours he spent washing windows were filled with new salesgirls, 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
103
housewives, and female functionaries, each of whom represented a potential erotic 
engagement.) 
What did he look for in them? What attracted him to them? Isn't making love merely an 
eternal repetition of the same? 
Not at all. There is always the small part that is unimaginable. When he saw a woman 
in her clothes, he could naturally imagine more or less what she would look like naked 
(his experience as a doctor supplementing his experience as a lover), but between the 
approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the 
unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest. And then, the pursuit of the 
unimaginable does not stop with the revelations of nudity; it goes much further: How 
would she behave while undressing? What would she say when he made love to her? 
How would her sighs sound? How would her face distort at the moment of orgasm? 
What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. 
All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people 
have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what 
cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered. 
Tomas, who had spent the last ten years of his medical practice working exclusively 
with the human brain, knew that there was nothing more difficult to capture than the 
human I. There are many more resemblances between Hitler and Einstein or Brezhnev 
and Solzhenitsyn than there are differences. Using numbers, we might say that there is 
one-millionth part dissimilarity to nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred 
ninety-nine millionths parts similarity. 
Tomas was obsessed by the desire to discover and appropriate that one-millionth part; 
he saw it as the core of his obsession. He was not obsessed with women; he was 
obsessed with what in each of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other words, with the 
one-millionth part that makes a woman dissimilar to others of her sex. 
(Here too, perhaps, his passion for surgery and his passion for women came together. 
Even with his mistresses, he could never quite put down the imaginary scalpel. Since 
he longed to take possession of something deep inside them, he needed to slit them 
open.) 
We may ask, of course, why he sought that millionth part dissimilarity in sex and 
nowhere else. Why couldn't he find it, say, in a woman's gait or culinary caprices or 
artistic taste? 
To be sure, the millionth part dissimilarity is present in all areas of human existence, but 
in all areas other than sex it is exposed and needs no one to discover it, needs no 
scalpel. One woman prefers cheese at the end of the meal, another loathes cauliflower, 
and although each may demonstrate her originality thereby, it is an originality that 
demonstrates its own irrelevance and warns us to pay it no heed, to expect nothing of 
value to come of it. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
104
Only in sexuality does the millionth part dissimilarity become precious, because, not 
accessible in public, it must be conquered. As recently as fifty years ago, this form of 
conquest took considerable time (weeks, even months!), and the worth of the 
conquered object was proportional to the time the conquest took. Even today, when 
conquest time has been drastically cut, sexuality seems still to be a strongbox hiding 
the mystery of a woman's I.
So it was a desire not for pleasure (the pleasure came as an extra, a bonus) but for 
possession of the world (slitting open the outstretched body of the world with his 
scalpel) that sent him in pursuit of women. 
Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their 
own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted 
by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world. 
The obsession of the former is