Muss Es Sein?

I just read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Now I’m not a particularly good analyst of books—sometimes I read too quickly and miss meaning, sometimes I come away with a different meaning altogether. I don’t care to read prolific prose on the meaning of our lives and I detest most books that scholarly people call things like “a paradigm of intellectual media for our era”. Anyway, where I was headed with this before that tangent was that when I read a book and post my thoughts on this blog, take what I say with a grain of salt. I don’t actually wish to be taken seriously or to debate my point of view or provide sound evidence for these thoughts. You have been warned.

Back to the original point on The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The title is the brain child of one of the characters who finds lightness, not heaviness, as the hardest thing to bear. If heaviness is characterized by the burdens that one accrues throughout life, then most people would argue that this heaviness is what gives rise to the weariness, the melancholy, and the despair that many people feel. Heaviness is the enemy. Heaviness is negative and dark. Lightness is envied and striven for. Those people who can cast of the shackles of responsibility and debt, those people who are free—how we envy them! for they are bound by nothing and may do as they please.

In reality, those of us who have adopted an existential viewpoint suffer from this “unbearable lightness”. For what life do we live when we have ties to nothing? We have one single life to live and it is in that one life that we come to know we are nothing. It is incredibly painful to live each day unburdened and unfettered to the future. Who would have thought that it is not our commitments and our burdens but instead it is our freedom that brings the angst of existentialism to light.

One other part of the book that I really identified with is a character who repeatedly questions his purpose—his “Es muss sein” (it must be). He is searching for the one thing in his life that is necessary. He is in love with his wife but he realizes that he could have fallen in love with any other woman who came along. He moves to several different countries so his heritage is no source of es muss sein. We (or I personally) would like to think that should we have the opportunity to live our lives again, there would be some calling, some passion that we would drift towards every time. What is that essence of our being? What is my es muss sein?