The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The unnamed narrator begins his story with a discussion of eternal return, the idea that “everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum”(1). This idea is central to Nietzsche’s philosophy, and he has long puzzled other philosophers with what the narrator terms his “mad myth” (1).

The first approaches the “myth” of eternal return by noting the emptiness of its opposite: “A life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance” (1). Thus, from the Nietzschean perspective, lives that are lived but once mean very little within the grand arc of human history.

Nietzsche, who was moved by the possibility of eternal recurrence, called it “das schwerste Gewicht,” or “the heaviest burden” (5). If each decision, each action undertaken throughout the course of an individual human life will reverberate throughout history, then “the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make” (5). The narrator posits the inherent lightness of a life lived only once as a “splendid” contrast to the burden of eternal return. And yet, he notes the proliferation of metaphors throughout history that associate weight with meaning.