However, not many will know the story is Kundera’s repudiation of the philosophical concept of eternal return (or eternal recurrence). If, as Friedrich Nietzsche believed, everything in life happens an infinite number of times, causing the “heaviest of burdens”, then a personal life in which everything happens only once loses its “weight” and “significance”. This belief contrasts with Greek philosopher Parmenides, who held that light (represented by warmth and fineness) is positive, while Nietzsche’s heaviness was negative.
Nominated for two Academy Awards, the cult 1988 movie The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which shares the same name as this week’s headline, starred Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin.
Some may know the movie was a screen adaptation of Czech writer Milan Kundera’s iconic 1984 work that was set in the Prague Spring and banned in Singapore until 2009.
