:)
A more accurate title (in terms of relevancy to the post) should be:
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being.
(
link to wiki for synopsis, the post will make a lot more sense if you read it.)
My one liner that I use to pitch this book to friends is that it's a love story intertwined with philosophical musings. Right after saying that line, I would flip to somewhere in the beginning and make them read the section where the Lightness and Heaviness paradox is introduced.
To quote the book:
what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
Agree/disagree? Personally, I'm not sure haha, more like, I'm too reluctant to think too deeply about that. Though I wholeheartedly agree with that there's no point in wondering if you made the right choice in a decision because there is no other life in which you chose the other option to compare to. Should always believe in the you that made the decision (funny how I wrote that in my diary roughly a year ago. Funny how the mention of this diary will come to play later on in the post).
Another interesting quotation talks about time and happiness, favourite topics of mine to...think without reaching much conclusion about.
And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
This comes from the end of the book, contrasting the first quotation which is within the opening pages. Dividing this quotation into 2 parts, firstly about human time running in a straight line instead of a circle. Imagine how different out perception of life would be if time indeed ran in a circle, or even just a part of a circle! ...I can't, so moving onto the second part, what is happiness? Just today in Ginelle's English seminar, she talked about 5 things that constitutes happiness: good fortune, contentment, satisfaction, and two others that I forgot xD But longing for repetition? Personally, yes. The sense of reliability that repetition brings is just so comforting, a stable reference point.
Onto the funny diary thing (an abrupt transition). It's actually quite a far fetched relation, the cover of my diary is the same as this painting I have on my bookshelf, which is what I based the following on:
It's with great reluctance that I am I posting this drawing,well...it's not a very good one <_<" Though I do really like how the women's expression turned out. I started drawing her and somehow she morphed into Tereza. Her worried expression, Tomas holding onto her trembling hand, she trying to make him happy. Also tried to convey the fact that aside from his head and hand (and heart I guess), no other part of him is exclusively occupied by her.
...Don't know where I'm going with this.
This essay is a better read than my thoughts haha (at least go read the block of text at the very end). I feel that I should be thinking harder about this.
It's a good book xD
