Milan kundera

Einmal ist keinmal.
What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The 
history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The history of 
the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind's fateful 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
118
inexperience. History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a 
feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow. 
Once more, and with a nostalgia akin to love, Tomas thought of the tall, stooped editor. 
That man acted as though history were a finished picture rather than a sketch. He acted 
as though everything he did were to be repeated endlessly, to return eternally, without 
the slightest doubt about his actions. He was convinced he was right, and for him that 
was a sign not of narrowmindedness but of virtue. Yes, that man lived in a history 
different from Tomas's: a history that was not (or did not realize it was) a sketch. 
Several days later, he was struck by another thought, which I record here as an 
addendum to the preceding chapter: Somewhere out in space there was a planet where 
all people would be born again. They would be fully aware of the life they had spent on 
earth and of all the experience they had amassed here. 
And perhaps there was still another planet, where we would all be born a third time with 
the experience of our first two lives. 
And perhaps there were yet more and more planets, where mankind would be born one 
degree (one life) more mature. 
That was Tomas's version of eternal return. 
Of course we here on earth (planet number one, the planet of inexperience) can only 
fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man on those other planets. Will he be 
wiser? Is maturity within man's power? Can he attain it through repetition? 
Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of 
pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that 
on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who 
thinks otherwise. 
One of Jules Verne's famous novels, a favorite of Tomas's in his childhood, is called 
Two Years on Holiday,
and indeed two years is the maximum. Tomas was in his third 
year as a window washer. 
In the last few weeks, he had come to realize (half sadly, half laughing to himself) that 
he had grown physically tired (he had one, sometimes two erotic engagements a day), 
and that although he had not lost his zest for women, he found himself straining his 
forces to the utmost. (Let me add that the strain was on his physical, not his sexual 
powers; his problem was with his breath, not with his penis, a state of affairs that had its 
comical side.) 
One day he was having trouble reaching a prospect for his afternoon time slot, and it 
looked as though he was going to have one of his rare off days. He was desperate. He 
had phoned a certain young woman about ten times. A charming acting student whose 
body had been tanned on Yugoslavia's nudist beaches with an evenness that called to 
mind slow rotation on a mechanized spit. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
119
After making one last call from his final job of the day and starting back to the office at 
four to hand in his signed order slips, he was stopped in the center of Prague by a 
woman he failed to recognize. Wherever have you disappeared to? I haven't seen you 
in ages!
Tomas racked his brains to place her. Had she been one of his patients? She was 
behaving like an intimate friend. He tried to answer in a manner that would conceal the 
fact that he did not recognize her. He was already thinking about how to lure her to his 
friend's flat (he had the key in his pocket) when he realized from a chance remark who 
the woman was: the budding actress with the perfect tan, the one he had been trying to 
reach all day. 
This episode both amused and horrified him: it proved that he was as tired mentally as 
physically. Two years of holiday could not be extended indefinitely. 
The holiday from the operating table was also a holiday from Tereza. After hardly 
seeing each other for six days, they would finally be together on Sundays, full of desire; 
but, as on the evening when Tomas came back from Zurich, they were estranged and 
had a long way to go before they could touch and kiss. Physical love gave them 
pleasure but no consolation. She no longer cried out as she had in the past, and, at the 
moment of orgasm, her grimace seemed to him to express suffering and a strange 
absence. Only at night, in sleep, were they tenderly united. Holding his hand, she would 
forget the chasm (the chasm of daylight) that divided them. But the nights gave him 
neither the time nor the means to protect and take care of her. In the mornings, it was 
heartrending to see her, and he feared for her: she looked sad and infirm. 
One Sunday, she asked him to take her for a ride outside Prague. They drove to a spa, 
where they found all the streets relabeled with Russian names and happened to meet 
an old patient of Tomas's. Tomas was devastated by the meeting. Suddenly here was 
someone talking to him again as to a doctor, and he could feel his former life bridging 
the divide, coming back to him with its pleasant regularity of seeing patients and feeling 
their trusting eyes on him, those eyes he had pretended to ignore but in fact savored 
and now greatly missed. 
Driving home, Tomas pondered the catastrophic mistake he had made by returning to 
Prague from Zurich. He kept his eyes trained on the road so as to avoid looking at 
Tereza. He was furious with her. Her presence at his side felt more unbearably 
fortuitous than ever. What was she doing here next to him? Who put her in the basket 
and sent her downstream? Why was