The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re‐Sourcing Catholic Intellectual Traditions

Abstract

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re‐Sourcing Catholic Intellectual Traditions Stephen Schloesser A human condition both catholic and Catholic The Unbearable Lightness of Being: even for those who have not read Milan Kundera’s dense metaphysical novel (or seen the movie based on it) the title is probably familiar. Familiar but also perhaps enigmatic—intentionally so, because the title is a play on words, a joke from the author of The Joke.1 In theory, lightness—in the sense of weightlessness—ought to be easy to bear. A five‐pound bag of sugar is light; a one‐hundred‐and‐fifty‐pound barbell might well be unbearable. It is heaviness, of course, that we would usually find unbearable. But when it comes to being, things are different. It is the lightness, the apparent insignificance of it all, that becomes heavy. This has always been true, but for those of us who live in a post‐Darwinian world, it is especially so. Pattiann Rogers’s poem, “The Possible Suffering of a God During Creation,” puts the problem graphically: Think of the million million dried stems of decaying: Dragonflies, the thousand thousand leathery cavities: Of old toads, the mounds of cows’teeth, the tufts: Of torn fur, the contorted eyes, the broken feet, the rank: Bloated odors, the fecund brown‐haired mildews: That are the residue of his process. How can he tolerate knowing: There is nothing else here on earth as bright and salty: As blood spilled in the open?2 What is true of being is even more true of self‐conscious being. The contingent, the accidental, the ephemeral, the unrepeatable and the irreplaceable—this, paradoxically, is what human being finds unbearable. And so we attempt to add weight, to anchor fleeting things to something lasting. For Milan Kundera, that anchor is beauty. It may not be eternal…but it is as good as it gets in our world of space‐time. Thoroughly post‐modernist, Kundera reaches far back into pre‐modern antiquity to construct his fundamental framework. On the one hand he invokes Parmenides to represent the One: it does not change, it is unitary, it is reliable, it is weighty. It is Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.3 On the other hand, Kundera (implicitly) invokes Heraclitus to represent the Many. All is flux learns every college freshman in Philosophy 101; panta rei reads the t‐shirt—you can’t step into the same river twice.4 All is changing, fragmentary, utterly unreliable, lighter than air. Paradoxically, this constant perishing—weightless as young Icarus falling from the sky with nary a notice from bystanders5—this blip on the vast canvas can be unbearably insignificant. “Einmal ist keinmal [Once is never],” Tomas says to himself in The Unbearable Lightness. “If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”6 And so Kundera negotiates two things he cannot accept: he not only cannot reconcile himself to a world of only passing shadows…but he also cannot accept religious belief. He provides an instructive “catholic” contrast to the “Catholic.” Like Catholicism, Kundera needs to root the flux in something more sturdy—root the many in the one. Unlike Catholicism, Kundera cannot tie the flux to Eternity. Memory’s long duration must serve as a finite substitute for Eternity. Memory connects the coincidences in our lives. They become our lives’ leit‐motifs, and if we take note of them, their gradual accumulation gathers weight and gives our lives substance. For Kundera, noticing coincidence functions as a kind of catholic (which is to say “universal”) imperative: “but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”7 As these leit‐motifs recur our lives become musical compositions.8 The many changing variations—while different and unique—are nonetheless recognizable because they contain repeated motifs. True: repetition is not forever—it is not an eternal return. But repetition recurs often enough to anchor our shadows. Memory provides the weight, paradoxically, that lightens the unbearable burden of being. That weight is the beauty that comes through remembrance. These are heady...