Milan Kundera posed a very interesting question in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea the heaviest of burdens. If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heaviest the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar in to the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
This may well be answered by a movie I like very much - Voyager (Homo Faber). "What was the use of looking anymore? There was nothing for me to see. Her hands that no longer existed anywhere, her movements as she tossed the pony-tail toward the back of her head, her teeth, her lips, her eyes that no longer existed anywhere - where could I look for them?" Sam Shepard does not want to be there and anywhere as thinking a certain woman who no longer exists.
Weight or lightness?
What shall we choose?
My column illustration titled "The City" | June 2012
