Manhattan & The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I read the Unbearable Lightness of Being over the summer. It has been on my mind a lot lately so I figured I would talk about it here. In order to talk about though I want to first talk about Woody Allen's Manhattan. They may seem unrelated but they have very similar themes.

Manhattan is a movie about falling in love and the many different forms it can take. It is also a movie about Manhattan, as breathtaking shots of the burrough are viewed through the eye of it's greatest lover, Woody Allen. The movie is primarily about a love triangle riddled with falling in and out of love, infidelities, tragedy and comedy. There is one point in the film where the main character makes a note that he wants to write a short story about men and women in Manhattan doing all kinds of desperate acts, like falling in love and cheating on their spouses, in order to distract themselves from the what he calls the big questions. What is our purpose? Where do we fit in the universe? Is there a god?

I mention this in brief because Katie and I just watched Manhattan the other night and I couldn't help by think of Milan Kundera and the Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is primarily the same tale only a different setting. It is about the Soviet invasion of Chechoslavakia, a couple named Tomas and Tereza, and many infidelities between the main characters and sub-characters. Similar to Manhattan, Kundera seems to be telling us, that political revolution, love, and infidelity, are all superficial, and we only fill our lives with them in order to distract ourselves from the big questions. When these things disappear we are presented with a moment of an unbearable lightness of being, where void of all the nonsense of our lives we are faced with the complex questions of existence. He calls this "unbearable" because the human drama of revolution, war, death, and infidelity is easier to handle than heavy existential questions.

Lately my life has felt free of superficial stresses, and I am faced with the unbearable lightness of being. I have many doubts and I am filled with despair much of the time. Yet I still have hope that we are all connected somehow and we aren't alone in the universe. In the book, when Tomas and Tereza fall in love, it is deduced to this moment when the couple sleeps together and they wake up holding hands. This was something that Tomas had never experienced before and afterwards he couldn't forgot about that moment and Tereza became the love of his life. This morning I woke up holding Katie's hand, which I don't think has ever happened, and since the book has been on my mind almost obsessively, I had a moment of clarity where the universe opened before me and everything seemed to be in it's proper place.

salaam alikum