Milan kundera

Es 
muss sein! He
was thinking of his love for Tereza. No sooner had he crossed the 
border, however, than he began to doubt whether it actually did have to be. Later, lying 
next to Tereza, he recalled that he had been led to her by a chain of laughable 
coincidences that took place seven years earlier (when the chief surgeon's sciatica was 
in its early stages) and were about to return him to a cage from which he would be 
unable to escape. 
Does that mean his life lacked any 
Es muss sein!, 
any overriding necessity? In my 
opinion, it did have one. But it was not love, it was his profession. He had come to 
medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner desire. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
100
Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-
seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is 
different. But all actors the world over are similar—in Paris, Prague, or the back of 
beyond. An actor is someone who in early childhood consents to exhibit himself for the 
rest of his life to an anonymous public. Without that basic consent, which has nothing to 
do with talent, which goes deeper than talent, no one can become an actor. Similarly, a 
doctor is someone who consents to spend his life involved with human bodies and all 
that they entail. That basic consent (and not talent or skill) enables him to enter the 
dissecting room during the first year of medical school and persevere for the requisite 
number of years. 
Surgery takes the basic imperative of the medical profession to its outermost border, 
where the human makes contact with the divine. When a person is clubbed violently on 
the head, he collapses and stops breathing. Some day, he will stop breathing anyway. 
Murder simply hastens a bit what God will eventually see to on His own. God, it may be 
assumed, took murder into account; He did not take surgery into account. He never 
suspected that someone would dare to stick his hand into the mechanism He had 
invented, wrapped carefully in skin, and sealed away from human eyes. When Tomas 
first positioned his scalpel on the skin of a man asleep under an anesthetic, then 
breached the skin with a decisive incision, and finally cut it open with a precise and 
even stroke (as if it were a piece of fabric—a coat, a skirt, a curtain), he experienced a 
brief but intense feeling of blasphemy. Then again, that was what attracted him to it! 
That was the 
Es muss sein! 
rooted deep inside him, and it was planted there not by 
chance, not by the chief's sciatica, or by anything external. 
But how could he take something so much a part of him and cast it off so fast, so 
forcefully, and so lightly? 
He would respond that he did it so as not to let the police misuse him. But to be quite 
frank, even if it was theoretically possible (and even if a number of cases have actually 
occurred), it was not too likely that the police would make public a false statement over 
his signature. 
Granted, a man has a right to fear dangers that are less than likely to occur. Granted, 
he was annoyed with himself and at his clumsiness, and desired to avoid further 
contact with the police and the concomitant feeling of helplessness. And granted, he 
had lost his profession anyway, because the mechanical aspirin-medicine he practiced 
at the clinic had nothing in common with his concept of medicine. Even so, the way he 
rushed into his decision seems rather odd to me. Could it perhaps conceal something 
else, something deeper that escaped his reasoning? 
Even though he came to love Beethoven through Tereza, Tomas was not particularly 
knowledgeable about music, and I doubt that he knew the true story behind 
Beethoven's famous