"The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

[fiefoe]

The more I try to tease out all the different themes in the book, the more they appear to be elegantly intertwined. This is a fugue in the form of a novel.

<Love of our own choosing:>

• We presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the "Es muss sein!" to our own great love.
• But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.
• Fidelity gave a unity to lives.
• The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and wich records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.
• Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
• She, born of six fortuities, she the blossom sprung from the cief surgeon's sciatica, she, the reverse side of all his "Es muss sein!"
• But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
• Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
• But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
• It's right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.
• If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator... Love lies beyond "Es muss sein!"

• "You mean you were really jealous?" she asked him ten times or ore, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Prize.
• Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams.
• Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.

<Metaphors:>
__ to find that the surface of her face reflected the crew of the soul charging up from below
__ (the birds of fortuity had begun alighting on her shoulders)
__ ...where the world is nothing but a vast concentration camp of bodies, one like the next, with souls invisible. 
__ the days of J. S. Bach, when music was like a rose blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence.
__ It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children's ball.
__ 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.

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