The unbearable lightness of being Read Online Free PDF Page B

melancholy, his compassion (that curse of emotional
telepathy) had taken a holiday. It had slept the sound Sunday sleep of a miner
who, after a hard week's work, needs to gather strength for his Monday shift.
        Instead of the patients he was treating,
Tomas saw Tereza.
    He tried to remind
himself. Don't think about her! Don't think about her! He said to himself, I'm
sick with compassion. It's good that she's gone and that I'll never see her
again, though it's not Tereza I need to be free of—it's that sickness,
compassion, which I thought I was immune to until she infected me with it.
    On Saturday and
Sunday, he felt the sweet lightness of being rise up to him out of the depths
of the future. On Monday, he was hit by a weight the likes of which he had
never known. The tons of steel of the Russian tanks were nothing compared with
it. For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain
weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain
intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
    He kept warning
himself not to give in to compassion, and compassion listened with bowed head
and a seemingly guilty conscience. Compassion knew it was being presumptuous,
yet it quietly stood its ground, and on the fifth day after her departure
Tomas informed the director of his hospital (the man who had phoned him daily
in Prague after the Russian invasion) that he had to return at once. He was
ashamed. He knew that the move would appear irresponsible, inexcusable to the
man. He thought to unbosom himself and tell him the story of Tereza and the
letter she had left on the table for him. But in the end
    32
    he
did not. From the Swiss doctor's point of view Tereza's move could only appear
hysterical and abhorrent. And Tomas refused to allow anyone an opportunity to
think ill of her. The director of the hospital was in fact offended. Tomas
shrugged his shoulders and said, "Es muss sein. Es muss sein."
    It
was an allusion. The last movement of Beethoven's last quartet is based on the
following two motifs:

    To make the meaning of the words absolutely clear, Beethoven introduced
the movement with a phrase, "Der schwer gefasste Entschluss," which is commonly translated as "the difficult resolution."
    This allusion to Beethoven was actually Tomas's first step back to Tereza,
because she was the one who had induced him to buy records of the Beethoven
quartets and sonatas.
    The allusion was even more pertinent than he had thought because the
Swiss doctor was a great music lover. Smiling serenely, he asked, in the
melody of Beethoven's motif, "Muss es sein?"
    "]a,
es muss sein!" Tomas said again.
    16
    Unlike
Parmenides, Beethoven apparently viewed weight as something positive. Since the
German word schwer means both "difficult" and
"heavy," Beethoven's "difficult resolution" may also be
construed as a "heavy" or "weighty resolution." The
weighty resolution is at one with the voice of Fate ( "Es muss
sein!"); necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably
bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
    This is a conviction born of Beethoven's music, and although we cannot
ignore the possibility (or even probability) that it owes its origins more to
Beethoven's commentators than to Beethoven himself, we all more or less share,
it: we believe that the greatness of man stems from the fact that he bears his fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders. Beethoven's hero is a
lifter of metaphysical weights.
    Tomas approached the Swiss border. I imagine a gloomy, shock-headed
Beethoven, in person, conducting the local firemen's brass band in a farewell
to emigration, an "Es Muss Sein " march.
    Then Tomas crossed the Czech border
and was welcomed by columns of Russian tanks. He had to stop his car and wait a
half hour before they passed. A terrifying soldier in the black Uniform of the
armored forces stood at the crossroads directing traffic as if every road in
the