Milan kundera

Es muss sein! 
Though that is not entirely true. Even if love is something other than a clockwork of sex 
that the Creator uses for His own amusement, it is still attached to it. It is attached to it 
like a tender naked woman to the pendulum of an enormous clock. 
Thomas thought: Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever 
had. 
He also thought: One way of saving love from the stupidity of sex would be to set the 
clockwork in our head in such a way as to excite us at the sight of a swallow. 
And with that sweet thought he started dozing off. But on the very threshold of sleep, in 
the no-man's-land of muddled concepts, he was suddenly certain he had just 
discovered the solution to all riddles, the key to all mysteries, a new utopia, a paradise: 
a world where man is excited by seeing a swallow and Tomas can love Tereza without 
being disturbed by the aggressive stupidity of sex. 
Then he fell asleep. 
Several half-naked women were trying to wind themselves around him, but he was 
tired, and to extricate himself from them he opened the door leading to the next room. 
There, just opposite him, he saw a young woman lying on her side on a couch. She, 
too, was half-naked: she wore nothing but panties. Leaning on her elbow, she looked 
up at him with a smile that said she had known he would come. 
He went up to her. He was filled with a feeling of unutterable bliss at the thought that he 
had found her at last and could be there with her. He sat down at her side, said 
something to her, and she said something back. She radiated calm. Her hand made 
slow, supple movements. All his life he had longed for the calm of her movements. 
Feminine calm had eluded him all his life. 
But just then the dream began its slide back to reality. He found himself back in that no-
man's-land where we are neither asleep nor awake. He was horrified by the prospect of 
seeing the young woman vanish before his eyes and said to himself, God, how I'd hate 
to lose her! He tried desperately to remember who she was, where he'd met her, what 
they'd experienced together. How could he possibly forget when she knew him so well? 
He promised himself to phone her first thing in the morning. But no sooner had he 
made the promise than he realized he couldn't keep it: he didn't know her name. How 
could he forget the name of someone he knew so well? By that time he was almost 
completely awake, his eyes were open, and he was asking himself, Where am I? Yes, 
I'm in Prague, but that woman, does she live here too? Didn't I meet her somewhere 
else? Could she be from Switzerland? It took him quite some time to get it into his head 
that he didn't know the woman, that she wasn't from Prague or Switzerland, that she 
inhabited his dream and nowhere else. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
127
He was so upset he sat straight up in bed. Tereza was breathing deeply beside him. 
The woman in the dream, he thought, was unlike any he had ever met. The woman he 
felt he knew most intimately of all had turned out to be a woman he did not even know. 
And yet she was the one he had always longed for. If a personal paradise were ever to 
exist for him, then in that paradise he would have to live by her side. The woman from 
his dream was the 
Es muss sein! 
of his love. 
He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's 
Symposium:
People were 
hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world 
over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. 
Let us suppose that such is the case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a 
partner who once formed part of our body. Tomas's other part is the young woman he 
dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he 
is sent a Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets 
the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The 
woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato's myth? 
He tried to picture himself living in an ideal world with the young woman from the 
dream. He sees Tereza walking past the open windows of their ideal house. She is 
alone and stops to look in at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes. He 
cannot withstand her glance. Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls 
prey to compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she 
tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular 
movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and 
presses them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and again he will 
abandon the house of his happiness, time and again abandon his paradise and the 
woman from his dream and betray the 
Es muss sein! 
of his love to go off with Tereza, 
the woman born of six laughable fortuities. 
All this time he was sitting up in bed and looking at the woman who was lying beside 
him and holding his hand in her sleep. He felt an ineffable love for her. Her sleep must 
have been very light at the moment because she opened her eyes and gazed up at him 
questioningly. 
What are you looking at? she asked. 
He knew that instead of waking her he should lull her back to sleep, so he tried to come 
up with an answer that would plant the image of a new dream in her mind. 
I'm looking at the stars, he said. 
Don't say you're looking at the stars. That's a lie. You're looking down.
That's because we're in an airplane. The stars are below us.
Oh, in an airplane, said Tereza, squeezing his hand even tighter and falling asleep 
again. And Tomas knew that Tereza was looking out of the round window of an airplane 
flying high above the stars. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
128