I recently reread The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The last time I read it, I was twenty; now I am over forty. At the time, I saw it as a love story full of clever thoughts. Having experienced more of life, including love, politics, my own craziness, psychology, other people’s craziness and writing, etc. I now understand much more of the book. I was sure I loved it when I was young. Now, I can say, I fall in love with it again, in a slightly different way.
We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, 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.
― Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being