Ⅰ. LIFE IS ART
This piece was supposed to be called: Reading Kundera in Prague. That is because I started this summer with a plan: to read all of Kundera, in order, in Prague. In an homage to the author — who, I later learned, is not the beacon of Czech literature that I blindly assumed he was (exiled in France, he denounced his homeland) — I thought it would be fitting to pair each novel with a Tinder date. (If you have read one of his works, you understand why.)
So, the vision was: Twelve volumes, twelve Tinder dates.
My project failed, on both accounts. I did not read all of Kundera’s novels in Prague. I finished Immortality, his seventh published work, on the flight back home.
And, fittingly, I only made it to seven dates (depending on how you count. And no, not with seven different guys). My progress was abruptly halted due to a phenomenon some may call “catching feelings” and I would call a miracle.
But I digress.
This summer I learned that reading Kundera’s corpus is like reading different permutations of the same book. His (for the most part, seven-part) novels feature characters in love affairs in tumultuous political times. Kundera turns over freedom and love and body-soul duality and nationality at every angle you could possibly imagine, and weaves these threads into one wonderful web.
One of his obsessions is the connection between life and narrative.
For Kundera, saying life has meaning is equivalent to saying life is a story. In The Joke, he writes, “the stories we live comprise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery.” The novel’s protagonist feels conscious of a central organizing force guiding his life that eludes him. He senses the existence of a narrator: the writer of his mythology. He expresses the “need continually to decipher my own life” — the need to close-read himself.
I’m reminded of that oft-quoted Joan Didion line: We tell stories in order to live. Kundera’s take is more radical. He tells his reader, again and again, that telling stories and living are inextricably bound. Our lives are “comprise[ed]” of stories — they have intrinsic meaning, which we can uncover by being attentive to the beauty around us. Narrative is not imposed but discovered.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera asks why uncanny coincidences are viewed by many as novelistic, and therefore trite; he argues if a man is “blind to such coincidences in his daily life… he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.” In Immortality, breaking the fourth wall, he says it once again: “Coincidence breathed unexpected significance into the event, and therefore I call it poetic coincidence.” Coincidences, which occur naturally, are evidence of life’s underlying poetry.
In Unbearable Lightness, Kundera connects Nietzsche’s eternal return to his discussion of life’s narrative force. He distills Nietzsche’s theory into a dichotomy of “lightness” and “heaviness.” Light events are fleeting, arbitrary; heavy ones reoccur eternally, sink in our stomach like rocks. He suggests that what we feel as an event’s heaviness is its narrative weight. This “weighty resolution is at one with the voice of Fate.”
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera moralizes this distinction: “If there were too much incontestable meaning in the world (the angels’ power), man would succumb under its weight. If the world were to lose all its meaning (the devil’s reign), we could not live either.”
So: narrative is meaning is heaviness is fate. Angelic — and therefore impossible to fully exist in.
And the “devil’s reign” is the negation of the above: meaningless and lightness and randomness. Only a nihilist would live in this realm permanently.
This line of argumentation is perhaps the best one I’ve come across in justifying my English degree. Literature not only increases our aesthetic appreciation of life — in increasing our sensitivity to narrative, it lets us see life’s substructure, unveils the “angels’ power.”
In Prague, my main extracurricular activity is walking and listening to the new Lorde album. (The title of this piece was inspired by the album’s track of the same name.) Every day, I walk by a corner with some very lovely graffiti. On a white terracotta wall, cartoon swimmers circle around the words “Life is art.” This summer, I believe it more every day.
This is partially because I meet someone, and threads weave us together. Our first date reminds me of a novel I just read. I see him in a movie I watch, in a song that pops on my shuffle. Looking through my camera roll, and realizing that I saw something he saw, before I knew him: for a moment, it feels like fate. To feel a tapestry grow between yourself and another, if only for a contained space in time — what else can you call that?
Ⅱ. FROM MY NOTES APP: TO LEARN TO SAY IN CZECH
Do you sell spatulas?
I don’t want to have sex with you, but we can be friends if you want.
The hot water does not work.
Like when you turn on the tap, the water is cold.
Cold like ice. Ice cold. Not lukewarm. Totally cold, the whole time.
No Czech, sorry.
Why are you fining me? I paid for my subway ticket, this doesn’t make sense.
Please do not fine me, I just got here, I do not know what I am doing.
Is this feta?
Are you arresting me?
I am American. No, I do not like Trump. Yes, it is a bad time to be American.
Yes, I know where that is. I bet I could beat you in a geography quiz.
Why did the tram stop?
What do you mean, there won’t be another one?
I am so sorry – I don’t know the rules here.
Can I have an Americano with two shots?
Like two shots of espresso.
Two espressos, and hot water, please.
Yes I totally agree: the New York City mayoral race is fucked.
What is that smell?
Do you know when the power will come back on? Wait, in the whole city, not just here?
Yes, my name is Italian. I am sort of Italian, but not really. I do not speak Italian.
I speak a little Russian. Not that much Russian. Definitely not that much Russian—
And no Czech.
Ⅲ. LIVING ON A TIGHTROPE
Having a conversation in a London cafe about the logistical difficulties of moving across the pond, I am reminded of the following passage, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.”
In short: it is both exhilarating and exhausting. In the novel, one character reflects that abroad, she feels like her country on the brink of political collapse, “which stuttered, gasped for breath, could not speak.”
In Prague, I do not feel perceived in public; I am free. This is a double-edged sword. I don’t think of myself as much of a crier, but in writing this piece it has occurred to me that I have cried, very publicly, in at least four European capitals over the past calendar year: a combination of emotional turmoil and getting stranded on public transit. In moments like this — lost in a place I don’t know, unable to speak a language I do — I feel my heart, on the other side of the Atlantic. Walking a tightrope, “the unbearable lightness of being” creeps over me.
For understanding Kundera’s use of the phrase, it’s helpful to look at Tolstoy. Although War and Peace isn’t mentioned in Unbearable Lightness, it inspired the title. I’ll try to avoid spoilers (just for you, Alistair): when he is dying, one character feels what Constance Garnett translates as an “aloofness from everything earthly” — a “strange lightness of being.” In his solitude he is “set free from some force that held him in bondage.”
But, just when he is about to die, “love for one woman stole unseen to his heart, and bound him again to life.”
Tolstoy and Kundera pinpoint a trade-off between freedom (an unearthly existence) and love (life).
And Tolstoy suggests that a life colored by the latter is more fulfilling: after this scene, the character mentioned above realizes: “All that I understand, I understand only because I love.”
Ⅳ. DIFFICULT THINGS
On the train to Budapest I need a break from translated Czech authors and I read Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, looking up every now and then to admire the endless sea of sunflowers out the window. The air is sticky and I’ve already managed to spill my coffee, crinkled brown pages and smudged ink. I mark the following passage:
“All plays turned on the same subject. Bullets went through heads in hotel bedrooms almost nightly on that account. When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred. Little else was talked of in theatres and popular novels. Yet we say it is a matter of no importance at all.”
To put it in Kundera’s language: love — romance — is heavy, but we pretend it’s light.
Scrolling online, I come across the following: “You have to be annoying and do everything as passionately and genuinely as possible because we live in a world where everyone operates through sixteen layers of post irony and to love with recklessness is literally counterculture.” Mainstream internet humor can feel corrosive; chalant-ness is often condemned to the realm of cringe. After a few Google searches, I learn that the user who wrote the above-quoted post effectively summed up post-post modernism. These are terms I don’t know very well. The main thing I know is I don’t have a nonchalant bone in my body, as my friends constantly remind me.
In his short story collection Laughable Loves, Kundera explores many light, laughing relationships. These relationships have a game-like quality. It often seems as though none of the lovers are in love at all: they play with each other’s minds and bodies, explicitly and implicitly. Their games are, in fact, not laughable: “Even in a game there lurks a lack of freedom; even a game is a trap for the players.” The laughing lovers are too nonchalant — they paradoxically trap themselves in an effort to avoid permanent ties, exiling themselves to Kundera’s “devil’s realm,” that world of meaninglessness.
In one section in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera imagines a conversation between two beacons of Italian literature: Petrarch, who dedicated over 300 sonnets to one woman, and Boccaccio, his contemporary. Petrarch says that joking is the “the enemy” of poetry and love, since “joking is a barrier between man and the world.”
Addressing Boccaccio — whose Decameron has an abundance of dark humor and grotesque love stories — Petrarch says: “Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.”
In his letters, Rainer Maria Rilke reminds the young poet that love and sex are difficult, “But difficult things are what we were set out to do, almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.”
Rilke suggests that young people take their thoughts too seriously, their hearts not seriously enough. I think Woolf, Kundera’s Petrarch, and Kundera himself would agree. I don’t have enough life experience to have a say, but I’m tempted to concur, as well.
Ⅴ. KAFKA
Franz Kafka first corresponded with Milena Jesenská in 1920; she translated a story of his. They exchanged (increasingly intimate) letters for around a year. The lovers met in person twice, for little more than a few days combined.
Kafka lived in an attic in Prague, in the old part of town. He was a noted insomniac. (Now having seen the streets of Prague at all hours, I don’t blame him: the city’s best time is the time between when the partiers retire and the commuters rise, when curtains of light bathe the Charles Bridge and mist softly floats off the river and flocks of pigeons fly overhead, and all the cliche things you could possible say about the city – it’s romantic, like a fairytale, paved with golden cobblestones and bleeding history – feel worth saying.)
Kafka was also prone to physical sickness, which he saw as a manifestation of emotional suffering. I learned the latter fact in the Kafka museum. When I went, a group of bored German schoolchildren crammed the dark, claustrophobic space. I had to say “excuse me” several times to read the quote on the wall behind them: “For secretly, I don’t believe this illness to be tuberculosis, but rather a sign of my general bankruptcy … The blood issues not from the lung, but from a decisive stab delivered by one of the combatants.” (Kafka died from tuberculosis shortly after writing that letter, in 1924.)
All to say: he could not have been accused of nonchalance.
As I’m sitting on my balcony above a Hooters facing a church reading Letters to Milena, a passage sinks in my stomach:
“I would be lying if I said I missed you: it’s the most perfect, most painful magic, you are here, just as I am and even more so; wherever I am, there you are too, and even more intensely. This is not a joke….” Under Milena’s phantom gaze, he feels “my world is collapsing, my world is rebuilding itself.”
I don’t think Kafka could have been a laughing lover if he tried.
Ⅵ. GYRE, WIDENING
When it seems like we’re about to be at war with Iran, I start watching CNN at night. I remember the war game simulations I used to read sitting cross-legged in hallways in schools across the tri-state area (I do not miss competitive debate at all), and I wonder if I should go home. My friends in Beirut and Amman see missiles overhead at night. I think of the many reasons I memorized for why the conflict will inevitably escalate, the many for why it won’t; I realize I don’t know anything at all. My brain short-circuts: the facts I know do not cohere in any satisfying fashion.
“And once more he had the strange feeling of having lived in his own country without knowing what was happening in it. He had lived, so to speak, at the center of the action. He had lived through all the current events … He always believed he was hearing the heartbeat of the country. But who knows what he was really hearing?”
In Farewell Waltz, Kundera captures the feeling of living in political instability. In Life is Elsewhere — a coming of age story set during Czechoslovakia’s communist revolution — he does the same. Against this backdrop, he describes the dissolution of a marriage: “The great matters of nations cannot make us forget the modest matters of the heart.”
Strikingly, Kundera suggests that the same undercurrent guides political and personal chaos — the “great matters of nations” and “modest” matters of the heart are cut of the same cloth. Tolstoy interrogates this idea, extensively, in War and Peace: pick any ballroom scene, and note how it’s colored by the language of the battlefield. Woolf identifies this, too. In Jacob’s Room she writes that all life is “driven by an unseizable force,” too big and impossible to capture.
Over a month after the whole war-with-Iran scare, when I land back in Prague in mid-July at eight in the morning, I feel a modest dose of unseizable force. Blurry eyes and heavy head, I almost fall asleep on the bus to the city center. After a little while, a man yells at me in Czech to get out: for some unknown reason, the route has been cancelled. Stranded on the side of the road, I think of Tamina’s exile in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting — she feels a “hollowness in her stomach,” that “terrifying weight of lightness.”
My physical location suddenly seems aggressively arbitrary to me. I feel like I can go anywhere; I don’t know where to go. That feeling of heady lightness, freedom: heartbreak’s consolation prize. Untethered, in free fall. I stare down Charybdis: this is like an Odyssey, except I am not going home.
Facts are not cohering, and everything is pulling apart at the seams. The hits keep coming (For me, three — I cut three chords in eight months). My friends are breaking up and down. Waves crash, again and again, before you have a chance to catch your breath, salt burns in your throat, up your nose. I’m scared of what will happen to me if they don’t stop; I’m scared of what will happen to me if they do. Scared to become jaded; scared to stop becoming.
And I’m embarrassed, for tending so much to my own wounds, when we’re at war for a news cycle and people are getting deported and there’s no peace in Gaza and a Ukrainian mother looks at me and tells me she hasn’t seen her husband in three years, and her children ask her every day when they could go home.
On the side of a Czech highway, I don’t know what to do.
Later in the day — after I’ve found my way back (long story) and shower and take a nap — my parents wake up and I call them. The lightness lifts; threads thicken.
My parents both say it’s normal — to feel cast out to sea in your 20s — and it’ll stop hurting with time. I repeat the same, painfully aware of the inadequacy of my words, over the phone to heartbroken friends: what more is there to say?
I feel anchored by electromagnetic waves criss-crossing the Atlantic. My father tells me he didn’t fully understand love until he had children. It’s hard for me to imagine this, because it’s hard to imagine loving my family and friends more than I currently do. (Lorelei, Shaye, Margo, Ollie, Nell: I think of you when listening to Ribs.)
I text back and forth with Hallie about Yeats’s The Second Coming. I tell her that between the news cycle and our news cycle, I’ve been feeling like:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
She sends me back Lapis Lazuli, by the same poet. These lines catch my eye:
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.
Ⅶ. A SCENE
The man behind the counter at the corner store saw them come by twice, two nights in a row. The first time they both wore rainjackets embossed with different German logos, beads of water dripping down. She walked in half a second after him, had stopped for a moment at the threshold to close her umbrella. The boy said hello to the man and the girl took off her hood with one hand and began to examine the rows of items in the shop as though the packaging was unfamiliar to her, and it was. She made a comment which included the word “bodega,” and the boy turned towards her and laughed, said something like: This ain’t New York, in a mock American accent. And it wasn’t, but the combination of neon lights inside the warm shop and the rainy cool concrete outside made her feel like she could ask for a BEC at the counter and find an orange tabby cat curled up on a bed of Campbell cans.
She twisted the ring around his finger; they realized they had been standing still too long. He asked her if she wanted anything other than water and she shook her head. When he moved to go around the aisle to find the drinks section, she let go of his hand for a moment to inspect the rows of purple chocolate wrappers. He was in the corner of her eye, she took out her phone, tapped the cracked surface. Her notes app was already pulled up, half a screen of black letters, she added to them:
Turns out Dostoevsky isn’t crazy:
This is a miracle, I’d follow you to Siberia
It was true, but too on the nose. She looked down at her phone, deleted what she had written, wrote it out again. The boy was talking to the guy restocking the drink inventory. When his eyes lifted up for a moment looking for hers, she looked back, and he smiled and continued the conversation. She heard him say: Nice one, mate.
She tried again:
And it feels too easy, letters escape me
I search for a word to hold the feeling: redeemed
Finger over delete, he came up from behind her and said: There you are. She put her phone back into her pocket.
The man behind the counter was speaking to the guy restocking the drinks in a language that she thought sounded like Arabic. Mid-sentence the man scanned the bottles and rang up the price, green numbers blinking. The boy moved to pay and she put her hand out instead, insisting. She emptied a zipper pocket of coins onto the counter: euro and crowns and quarters and quetzales. She fumbled for a moment before triumphantly wielding a ten pound note. The man and the boy both looked incredulous, simultaneously said something to the effect of: that bill is no longer in circulation, hasn’t been for a while. They both laughed with her. The boy said something like: we can go to a bank tomorrow and you can exchange it, and she said: no I’ll just keep it, my mother gave it to me. The man behind the counter looked between them. She found a different note and handed it to him, tucked the change into her wallet to join the motley chorus.
As they walked out, they both put their hoods up, she didn’t move to open her umbrella, and he took her hand. Later, she would try to hold the moment in words: held in his gaze, she felt tethered to earth.