Milan kundera

Muss es sein? Es muss sein! 
motif. 
This is how it goes: A certain Dembscher owed Beethoven fifty florins, and when the 
composer, who was chronically short of funds, reminded him of the debt, Dembscher 
heaved a mournful sigh and said, 
Muss es sein? 
To which Beethoven replied, with a 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
101
hearty laugh, 
Es muss sein! 
and immediately jotted down these words and their 
melody. On this realistic motif he then composed a canon for four voices: three voices 
sing 
Es muss sein, es muss sein, ja, ja, ja, ja! 
(It must be, it must be, yes, yes, yes, 
yes!), and the fourth voice chimes in with 
Heraus mit dem Beutel! 
(Out with the purse!). 
A year later, the same motif showed up as the basis for the fourth movement of the last 
quartet, Opus 155. By that time, Beethoven had forgotten about Dembscher's purse. 
The words 
Es muss sein! 
had acquired a much more solemn ring; they seemed to issue 
directly from the lips of Fate. In Kant's language, even Good morning, suitably 
pronounced, can take the shape of a metaphysical thesis. German is a language of 
heavy
words. 
Es muss sein! 
was no longer a joke; it had become 
der schwer gefasste 
Entschluss 
(the difficult or weighty resolution). 
So Beethoven turned a frivolous inspiration into a serious quartet, a joke into 
metaphysical truth. It is an interesting tale of light going to heavy or, as Parmenides 
would have it, positive going to negative. Yet oddly enough, the transformation fails to 
surprise us. We would have been shocked, on the other hand, if Beethoven had 
transformed the seriousness of his quartet into the trifling joke of a four-voice canon 
about Dembscher's purse. Had he done so, however, he would have been in the spirit 
of Parmenides and made heavy go to light, that is, negative to positive! First (as an 
unfinished sketch) would have come the great metaphysical truth and last (as a finished 
masterpiece)—the most frivolous of jokes! But we no longer know how to think as 
Parmenides thought. 
It is my feeling that Tomas had long been secretly irritated by the stern, aggressive, 
solemn 
Es muss sein! 
and that he harbored a deep desire to follow the spirit of 
Parmenides and make heavy go to light. Remember that at one point in his life he 
broke completely with his first wife and his son and that he was relieved when both his 
parents broke with him. What could be at the bottom of it all but a rash and not quite 
rational move to reject what proclaimed itself to be his weighty duty, his 
Es muss sein!
'? 
That, of course, was an external 
Es muss sein! 
reserved for him by social convention, 
whereas the 
Es muss sein! of 
his love for medicine was internal. So much the worse for 
him. Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an 
inducement to revolt. 
Being a surgeon means slitting open the surface of things and looking at what lies 
hidden inside. Perhaps Tomas was led to surgery by a desire to know what lies hidden 
on the other side of 
Es muss sein!
; in other words, what remains of life when a person 
rejects what he previously considered his mission. 
The day he reported to the good-natured woman responsible for the cleanliness of all 
shop windows and display cases in Prague, and was confronted with the result of his 
decision in all its concrete and inescapable reality, he went into a state of shock, a state 
that kept him in its thrall during the first few days of his new job. But once he got over 
the astounding strangeness of his new life (it took him about a week), he suddenly 
realized he was simply on a long holiday. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
102
Here he was, doing things he didn't care a damn about, and enjoying it. Now he 
understood what made people (people he always pitied) happy when they took a job 
without feeling the compulsion of an internal