“Live as if you are living a second time,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his 1946 seminal book on man's search for meaning, “And as if you did as badly the first time as you are about to do now!” And yet we live only once, without repetition or revenge – a fact at the same time so oppressive and full that it may give us, in the lofty words of the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, “unfitness for the right to live.” All the while, we move forward accompanied by versions of ourselves that we failed or chose not to be. “The lives we live,” wrote psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his beautiful manifesto on missing out, “It may be long mourning, or perpetual resentment, for the lives we could not live. But the liberation we experience, whether forced or chosen, makes us who we are.” We do this existential dance of esses and nos to the siren song of one immutable question: How do we know what we want, what to looking for?
Czech-French writer Milan Kundera (March 31, 1929–July 11, 2023) explores our ambivalent ambivalence in life with unparalleled grace and poetic precision in his 1984 book. The Unbearable Light of Existence (public library) – one of the most popular and consistently rewarding books of the last century.
Because love heightens all our senses and magnifies our existential concerns, perhaps it is in love that the ambivalences of life become most disturbing – something the novel's protagonist, Tomáš, struggles with as he finds himself preoccupied with the idea of a lover he doesn't know:
He could feel the indescribable love of this complete stranger.
[…]
But was it love? … Was it simply the intensity of a man who, realizing deep down in his heart a lack of love, felt the need to deceive himself in order to imitate? … When he looked outside the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized that he did not know whether it was tension or love.
The woman eventually becomes Tomáš's wife, further confirming that even the right choice can present itself to us shrouded in uncertainty and doubt at first, its rightness only highlighted in the clarity of hindsight. Kundera captures the seriousness underlying Tomáš's particular confusion:
We will never know what to seek, because, living only one life, we will not be able to compare it with our previous lives or perfect it in our future lives.
[…]
There are no ways to test which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like a player walking in the cold. And can life have value if the first exercise of life is life itself? That's why life is always like a painting. No, “sketch” is not the perfect word, because a sketch is the outline of something, the basis of a picture, and the sketch that is our life is an empty sketch, a frame without a picture.
The Unbearable Light of Existenceit has multiples, it is one of the most life-enhancing books one can read. Complete this turning point with Donald Barthelme on the art of ignorance and Adam Phillips on the rewards of still life.
