The Unbearable Lightness of Being

And also there's a whole cultural context.

He is taught by Milan Kundera, the novelist, the author of Unbearable Lightness of Being.

And there's a future president of the Czech Republic in his sort of retinue of associates.

So, yeah, that's the prologue.

He was originally, like, he was training to become a film writer together with Vaclav Haal.

Yeah, I mean, it's such a great, there's so many great stories around here.

And of course, you know, Unbearable Lightness of Being is actually set in this period.

And there is, I find so many, I love the story, by the way, of Milankundra being in bed with one of his lovers and there being a knocking on the door and And he thinks, oh, my God, and he's standing in the middle of the room naked, you know, and somebody shouts through the door, the Russians are invading.

The writing was on the wall, I guess.

Honestly, if we put the jokes aside, this worm question always reminds me of Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

In Kafka, the guy literally wakes up as a bug, you know, like the worm test, and his family eventually stops loving him.

It's a tragedy.

My favorite American writer is James Baldwin.

A contemporary book that I love to teach because my students love it so much, my honor students, is Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

They really, they just love that book.

So-

student

than The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.

Tell me about your relationship to that book and its relationship to this story.

Well, it's almost entirely an imaginary relationship at that point because I read it when I was so young and I have not read it since.

Okay.

I am currently rereading The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

That is something that I have read a very long time ago.

I mean, it's from the 80s.

And while I had a lot of fun listening to people in Libya or in Rwanda or in Kazakhstan, you can just listen really, if you really listen to whoever it is who lives down the block.

And if you really listen and try to incorporate it, you know, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera describes, I think it's that one, it's one of his books, but it has this description of what conversation is like.

And he says, the conversation consists entirely of a person saying something intimate, and the other person saying, that's just like me, I...

And then the other person listens and says, oh, that's just like me.