Milan kundera

semantic river:
each time the same 
object would give rise to a new meaning, though all former meanings would resonate 
(like an echo, like a parade of echoes) together with the new one. Each new experience 
would resound, each time enriching the harmony. The reason why Tomas and Sabina 
were touched by the sight of the bowler hat in a Zurich hotel and made love almost in 
tears was that its black presence was not merely a reminder of their love games but 
also a memento of Sabina's father and of her grandfather, who lived in a century 
without airplanes and cars. 
Now, perhaps, we are in a better position to understand the abyss separating Sabina 
and Franz: he listened eagerly to the story of her life and she was equally eager to hear 
the story of his, but although they had a clear understanding of the logical meaning of 
the words they exchanged, they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of the river flowing 
through them. 
And so when she put on the bowler hat in his presence, Franz felt uncomfortable, as if 
someone had spoken to him in a language he did not know. It was neither obscene nor 
sentimental, merely an incomprehensible gesture. What made him feel uncomfortable 
was its very lack of meaning. 
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its 
opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way 
Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they 
are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, 
and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them. 
If I were to make a record of all Sabina and Franz's conversations, I could compile a 
long lexicon of their misunderstandings. Let us be content, instead, with a short 
dictionary. 
A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words
WOMAN 
Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot 
consider either our merit or our failure. Sabina believed that she had to assume the 
correct attitude to her unchosen fate. To rebel against being born a woman seemed as 
foolish to her as to take pride in it. 
During one of their first times together, Franz announced to her, in an oddly emphatic 
way, Sabina, you are a 
woman. 
She could not understand why he accentuated the 
obvious with the solemnity of a Columbus who has just sighted land. Not until later did 
she understand that the word woman, on which he had placed such uncommon 
emphasis, did not, in his eyes, signify one of the two human sexes; it represented a 
value.
Not every woman was worthy of being called a woman. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
45
But if Sabina was, in Franz's eyes, a 
woman,
then what was his wife, Marie-Claude? 
More than twenty years earlier, several months after Franz met Marie-Claude, she had 
threatened to take her life if he abandoned her. Franz was bewitched by the threat. He 
was not particularly fond of Marie-Claude, but he was very much taken with her love. 
He felt himself unworthy of so great a love, and felt he owed her a low bow. 
He bowed so low that he married her. And even though Marie-Claude never recaptured 
the emotional intensity that accompanied her suicide threat, in his heart he kept its 
memory alive with the thought that he must never hurt her and always respect the 
woman in her. 
It is an interesting formulation. Not respect Marie-Claude, but respect the woman in 
Marie-Claude.
But if Marie-Claude is herself a woman, then who is that other woman hiding in her, the 
one he must always respect? The Platonic ideal of a woman, perhaps? 
No. His mother. It never would have occurred to him to say he respected the woman in 
his mother. He worshipped his mother and not some woman inside her. His mother and 
the Platonic ideal of womanhood were one and the same. 
When he was twelve, she suddenly found herself alone, abandoned by Franz's father. 
The boy suspected something serious had happened, but his mother muted the drama 
with mild, insipid words so as not to upset him. The day his father left, Franz and his 
mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that her shoes did 
not match. He was in a quandary: he wanted to point out her mistake, but was afraid he 
would hurt her. So during the two hours they spent walking through the city together he 
kept his eyes fixed on her feet. It was then he had his first inkling of what it means to 
suffer. 
FIDELITY AND BETRAYAL 
He loved her from the time he was a child until the time he accompanied her to the 
cemetery; he loved her in his memories as well. That is what made him feel that fidelity 
deserved pride of place among the virtues: fidelity gave a unity to lives that would 
otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions. 
Franz often spoke about his mother to Sabina, perhaps even with a certain 
unconscious ulterior motive: he assumed that Sabina would be charmed by his ability to 
be faithful, that it would win her over. 
What he did not know was that Sabina was charmed more by betrayal than by fidelity. 
The word fidelity reminded her of her father, a small-town puritan, who spent his 
Sundays painting away at canvases of woodland sunsets and roses in vases. Thanks 
to him, she started drawing as a child. When she was fourteen, she fell in love with a 
boy her age. Her father was so frightened that he would not let her out of the house by 
herself for a year. One day, he showed her some Picasso reproductions and made fun 
of them. If she couldn't love her fourteen-year-old schoolboy, she could at least love 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
46
cubism. After completing school, she went off to Prague with the euphoric feeling that 
now at last she could betray her home. 
Betrayal. From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most 
heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. 
Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing 
more magnificent than going off into the unknown. 
Though a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, she was not allowed to paint like 
Picasso. It was the period when so-called socialist realism was prescribed and the 
school manufactured Portraits of Communist statesmen. Her longing to betray her 
rather remained unsatisfied: Communism was merely another rather, a father equally 
strict and limited, a father who forbade her love (the times were puritanical) and 
Picasso, too. And if she married a second-rate actor, it was only because he had a 
reputation for being eccentric and was unacceptable to both fathers. 
Then her mother died. The day following her return to Prague from the funeral, she 
received a telegram saying that her father had taken his life out of grief. 
Suddenly she felt pangs of conscience: Was it really so terrible that her father had 
painted vases filled with roses and hated Picasso? Was it really so reprehensible that 
he was afraid of his fourteen-year-old daughter's coming home pregnant? Was it really 
so laughable that he could not go on living without his wife? 
And again she felt a longing to betray: betray her own betrayal. She announced to her 
husband (whom she now considered a difficult drunk rather than an eccentric) that she 
was leaving him. 
But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we 
have placated A. The life of a divorcee-painter did not in the least resemble the life of 
the parents she had betrayed. The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain 
reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the 
point of our original betrayal. 
MUSIC 
For Franz music was the art that comes closest to Dionysian beauty in the sense of 
intoxication. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help 
getting drunk on Beethoven's Ninth, Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or 
the Beatles' White Album? Franz made no distinction between classical music and pop. 
He found the distinction old-fashioned and hypocritical. He loved rock as much as 
Mozart. 
He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the 
dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into 
the world to make friends. He loved to dance and regretted that Sabina did not share 
his passion. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
47
They were sitting together at a restaurant, and loud music with a heavy beat poured out 
of a nearby speaker as they ate. 
It's a vicious circle, Sabina said. People are going deaf because music is played louder 
and louder. But because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
Don't you like music? Franz asked. 
No, said Sabina, and then added, though in a different era... She was thinking of the 
days of Johann Sebastian Bach, when music was like a rose blooming on a boundless 
snow-covered plain of silence. 
Noise masked as music had pursued her since early childhood. During her years at the 
Academy of Fine Arts, students had been required to spend whole summer vacations at 
a youth camp. They lived in common quarters and worked together on a steelworks 
construction site. Music roared out of loudspeakers on the site from five in the morning 
to nine at night. She felt like crying, but the music was cheerful, and there was nowhere 
to hide, not in the latrine or under the bedclothes: everything was in range of the 
speakers. The music was like a pack of hounds that had been sicked on her. 
At the time, she had thought that only in the Communist world could such musical 
barbarism reign supreme. Abroad, she discovered that the transformation of music into 
noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of 
total ugliness. The total ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent 
acoustical ugliness: cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers, sirens. The 
omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon follow. 
After dinner, they went upstairs to their room and made love, and as Franz fell asleep 
his thoughts began to lose coherence. He recalled the noisy music at dinner and said to 
himself, Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that 
all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for 
formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings 
were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling 
through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he 
yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, 
absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, overpowering, window-rattling 
din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the 
negation of sentences, music was the anti-word! He yearned for one long embrace with 
Sabina, yearned never to say another sentence, another word, to let his orgasm fuse 
with the orgiastic thunder of music. And lulled by that blissful imaginary uproar, he fell 
asleep. 
LIGHT AND DARKNESS 
Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which 
blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all 
extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for 
extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death. 
In Franz the word light did not evoke the picture of a landscape basking in the soft glow 
of day; it evoked the source of light itself: the sun, a light bulb, a spotlight. Franz's 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
48
associations were familiar metaphors: the sun of righteousness, the lambent flame of 
the intellect, and so on. 
Darkness attracted him as much as light. He knew that these days turning out the light 
before making love was considered laughable, and so he always left a small lamp 
burning over the bed. At the moment he penetrated Sabina, however, he closed his 
eyes. The pleasure suffusing his body called for darkness. That darkness was pure, 
perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without borders; that 
darkness was the infinite we each carry within us. (Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just 
close your eyes!) 
And at the moment he felt pleasure suffusing his body, Franz himself disintegrated and 
dissolved into the infinity of his darkness, himself becoming infinite. But the larger a 
man grows in his own inner darkness, the more his outer form diminishes. A man with 
closed eyes is a wreck of a man. Then, Sabina found the sight of Franz distasteful, and 
to avoid looking at him she too closed her eyes. But for her, darkness did not mean 
infinity; for her, it meant a disagreement with what she saw, the negation of what was 
seen, the refusal to see. 
Sabina once allowed herself to be taken along to a gathering of fellow emigres. As 
usual, they were hashing over whether they should or should not have taken up arms 
against the Russians. In the safety of emigration, they all naturally came out in favor of 
fighting. Sabina said: Then why don't you go back and fight?
That was not the thing to say. A man with artificially waved gray hair pointed a long 
index finger at her. That's no way to talk. You're all responsible for what happened. 
You, too. How did you oppose the Communist regime? All you did was paint pictures. ...
Assessing the populace, checking up on it, is a principal and never-ending social 
activity in Communist countries. If a painter is to have an exhibition, an ordinary citizen 
to receive a visa to a country with a sea coast, a soccer player to join the national team, 
then a vast array of recommendations and reports must be garnered (from the 
concierge, colleagues, the police, the local Party organization, the pertinent trade 
union) and added up, weighed, and summarized by special officials. These reports 
have nothing to do with artistic talent, kicking ability, or maladies that respond well to 
salt sea air; they deal with one thing only: the citizen's political profile (in other words, 
what the citizen says, what he thinks, how he behaves, how he acquits himself at 
meetings or May Day parades). Because everything (day-to-day existence, promotion 
at work, vacations) depends on the outcome of the assessment process, everyone 
(whether he wants to play soccer for the national team, have an exhibition, or spend his 
holidays at the seaside) must behave in such a way as to deserve a favorable 
assessment. 
That was what ran through Sabina's mind as she listened to the gray-haired man 
speak. He didn't care whether his fellow-countrymen were good kickers or painters 
(none of the Czechs at the emigre gathering ever showed any interest in what Sabina 
painted); he cared whether they had opposed Communism actively or just passively, 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
49
really and truly or just for appearances' sake, from the very beginning or just since 
emigration. 
Because she was a painter, she had an eye for detail and a memory for the physical 
characteristics of the people in Prague who had a passion for assessing others. All of 
them had index fingers slightly longer than their middle fingers and pointed them at 
whomever they happened to be talking to. In fact, President Novotny, who had ruled the 
country for the fourteen years preceding 1968, sported the very same barber-induced 
gray waves and had the longest index finger of all the inhabitants of Central Europe. 
When the distinguished emigre heard from the lips of a painter whose pictures he had 
never seen that he resembled Communist President Novotny, he turned scarlet, then 
white, then scarlet again, then white once more; he tried to say something, did not 
succeed, and fell silent. Everyone else kept silent until Sabina stood up and left. 
It made her unhappy, and down in the street she asked herself why she should bother 
to maintain contact with Czechs. What bound her to them? The landscape? If each of 
them were asked to say what the name of his native country evoked in him, the images 
that came to mind would be so different as to rule out all possibility of unity. 
Or the culture? But what was that? Music? Dvorak and Janacek? Yes. But what if a 
Czech had no feeling for music? Then the essence of being Czech vanished into thin 
air. 
Or great men? Jan Hus? None of the people in that room had ever read a line of his 
works. The only thing they were all able to understand was the flames, the glory of the 
flames when he was burned at the stake, the glory of the ashes, so for them the 
essence of being Czech came down to ashes and nothing more. The only things that 
held them together were their defeats and the reproaches they addressed to one 
another. 
She was walking fast. She was more disturbed by her own thoughts than by her break 
with the emigres. She knew she was being unfair. There were other Czechs, after all, 
people quite different from the man with the long index finger. The embarrassed silence 
that followed her little speech did not by any means indicate they were all against her. 
No, they were probably bewildered by the sudden hatred, the lack of understanding 
they were all subjected to in emigration. Then why wasn't she sorry for them? Why 
didn't she see them for the woeful and abandoned creatures they were? 
We know why. After she betrayed her father, life opened up before her, a long road of 
betrayals, each one attracting her as vice and victory. She