Milan kundera

Es muss sein! 
—
she was the only thing he cared about. 
Why even think about whether to sign or not? There was only one criterion for all his 
decisions: he must do nothing that could harm her. Tomas could not save political 
prisoners, but he could make Tereza happy. He could not really succeed in doing even 
that. But if he signed the petition, he could be fairly certain that she would have more 
frequent visits from undercover agents, and that her hands would tremble more and 
more. 
It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground, he said, than to 
send petitions to a president.
He knew that his words were incomprehensible, but enjoyed them all the more for it. He 
felt a sudden, unexpected intoxication come over him. It was the same black 
intoxication he had felt when he solemnly announced to his wife that he no longer 
wished to see her or his son. It was the same black intoxication he had felt when he 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
116
sent off the letter that meant the end of his career in medicine. He was not at all sure he 
was doing the right thing, but he was sure he was doing what he wanted to do. 
I'm sorry, he said, but I'm not going to sign.
Several days later he read about the petition in the papers. 
There was not a word, of course, about its being a politely worded plea for the release 
of political prisoners. None of the papers cited a single sentence from the short text. 
Instead, they went on at great length and in vague, menacing terms about an anti-state 
proclamation meant to lay the foundation for a new campaign against socialism. They 
also listed all the signatories, accompanying each of their names with slanderous 
attacks that gave Tomas gooseflesh. 
Not that it was unexpected. The fact that any public undertaking (meeting, petition, 
street gathering) not organized by the Communist Party was automatically considered 
illegal and endangered all the participants was common knowledge. But it may have 
made him sorrier he had not signed the petition. 
Why hadn't he signed? He could no longer quite remember what had prompted his 
decision. 
And once more I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: 
standing at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite. 
This is the image from which he was born. As I have pointed out before, characters are 
not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor 
containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has 
discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write 
only about himself? Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; 
hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; 
betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's 
fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden 
microphones—I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet 
none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The 
characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally 
fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I 
myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own I 
ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks 
about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the 
trap the world has become. But enough. Let us return to Tomas. 
Alone in his flat, he stared across the courtyard at the dirty walls of the building 
opposite. He missed the tall, stooped man with the big chin and the man's friends, 
whom he did not know, who were not even members of his circle. He felt as though he 
had just met a beautiful woman on a railway platform, and before he could say anything 
to her, she had stepped into a sleeping car on its way to Istanbul or Lisbon. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
117
Then he tried again to think through what he should have done. Even though he did his 
best to put aside everything belonging to the realm of the emotions (the admiration he 
had for the editor and the irritation his son caused him), he was still not sure whether he 
ought to have signed the text they gave him. 
Is it right to raise one's voice when others are being silenced? Yes. 
On the other hand, why did the papers devote so much space to the petition? After all, 
the press (totally manipulated by the state) could have kept it quiet and no one would 
have been the wiser. If they publicized the petition, then the petition played into the 
rulers' hands! It was manna from heaven, the perfect start and justification for a new 
wave of persecution. 
What then should he have done? Sign or not? 
Another way of formulating the question is, Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the 
end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death? 
Is there any answer to these questions? 
And again he thought the thought we already know: 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. 
History is similar to individual lives in this respect. There is only one history of the 
Czechs. One day it will come to an end as surely as Tomas's life, never to be repeated. 
In 1618, the Czech estates took courage and vented their ire on the emperor reigning in 
Vienna by pitching two of his high officials out of a window in the Prague Castle. Their 
defiance led to the Thirty Years War, which in turn led to the almost complete 
destruction of the Czech nation. Should the Czechs have shown more caution than 
courage? The answer may seem simple; it is not. 
Three hundred and twenty years later, after the Munich Conference of 1938, the entire 
world decided to sacrifice the Czechs' country to Hitler. Should the Czechs have tried to 
stand up to a power eight times their size? In contrast to 1618, they opted for caution. 
Their capitulation led to the Second World War, which in turn led to the forfeit of their 
nation's freedom for many decades or even centuries. Should they have shown more 
courage than caution? What should they have done? 
If Czech history could be repeated, we should of course find it desirable to test the 
other possibility each time and compare the results. Without such an experiment, all 
considerations of this kind remain a game of hypotheses.