1

However cruel, however beautiful, however radiant life may be, even that cruelty, that beauty, that radiance may in the end be meaningless.

What answer would Nietzsche give us?

Tereza was obsessed with Tomas. If love is a will to power, then Tereza must have been drawn to Tomas’s strength, wanting to win his heart. She always carried within her a longing to rise upward. That she could not leave his side even through his infidelities may have been, in its own way, an attempt to defeat him — to gain, for herself, a strength that surpassed his. That he finally became as gentle as a rabbit may well mean that Tereza had won.

In love, the winner is the one who wins the other’s heart; the one who gives their heart is left in the position of the loser. But didn’t Nietzsche say that anyone could become an Übermensch? In his final years, didn’t Tomas come to see his own reflection in Tereza? The baby who came floating downriver in a basket became, in the end, the teacher who held him steady and taught him happiness.

2

What is the reason for living? It took even me a long time to find an answer. There’s a saying that an altruistic life is the most selfish thing of all. But that saying doesn’t come easily to me.

And yet — what if the object of that love is someone you truly, deeply love? The desire to give love has no limit. Sometimes we try to protect that love even at the cost of our own life. Countless works of literature, science, and technology have their origin in love. It may be the strongest force there is, one that transcends the merely material.

Is love a fall? Tomas went from a successful surgeon to a mere country man — socially, someone no longer needed. But what does it even mean to be “socially needed” in the first place? Everyone believes in something. Whether the god they serve is capitalism or a religious god, people live out their love for whatever it is they believe in. Perhaps the gods they serve want, through endless struggle, to grow stronger and draw closer to them. Some may even choose death, to reach their god faster, to lessen the pain of reality. Though Nietzsche would say those gods are already dead.

What god did Tomas believe in? He believed in the god of Woman. He chased desire endlessly, never trying to settle down with Tereza or find contentment in her. And yet he was defeated by the very being he had thought weakest of all: Tereza. She refused to yield to his every indiscretion, and in the end, she was the one who took his heart. In his final years, he found, in Tereza, the very god he had been chasing all along.

3

What is success? Let’s think of success as a kind of numbers game. If we call 0 failure and 1 success, then the world can be seen as a world of information made of 0s and 1s. People travel to obtain the 1s scattered throughout the world. Whether by reading books or meeting people, we study in order to fill our own 0s with 1. The first step in turning a 0 into a 1 is finding the 0 — and that is likely a state of dissatisfaction. Only by recognizing our own lack can we know what to turn into a 1. In an age of information, discovering how to turn a 0 into a 1 takes only a little effort. But discovering the 0 hidden within yourself — that is what real learning is.

Success, in a sense, has nothing to do with time. Time is felt relatively, depending on brain activity. Some people think faster than others, some slower, and the speed of thought is tied to the speed at which one reads and absorbs information. So the work of turning a discovered 0 into a 1 can move at a different pace for each person. But discovering the 0 in the first place is closer to luck — meeting someone more remarkable than yourself, meeting a teacher who wakes you up to your own shortcomings, meeting a friend who makes you realize a strength you never had. These are the kinds of encounters worth calling fated.

What helps us discover our 0 is a partner we can actually talk to — and this applies not only to other people, but to nature as well. Humans are part of nature, and nature teaches us a great deal. Even scientists who made their names in history working mostly alone must surely have been in constant conversation with nature.

The more someone pursues perfection, the more they’ll realize that turning a 0 into a 1 isn’t really all that hard. What they truly want is someone who can discover their 0 for them. The self discovers, in the very act of conversing with “you,” the self that lives inside “you” as well — and that may be a 1 within me, or it may be a 0. A 1 is empathy for something already possessed; a 0 is the discovery of a lack, something not yet possessed. Perhaps the reason opposites attract so intensely is that each finds, in the other, the 0s and 1s they themselves lack.

4

Could love, then, be explained in terms of 0s and 1s? Some futurists — particularly the scholars who appear in books like State of the Future 2045 — believe it could. Their argument is that human thought and judgment have their own proper causes and effects, and that connecting the human brain to a computer could therefore make mind-uploading possible. Is the love we chase, in the end, something like an illusion — something that could be understood as nothing more than binary signals of 0 and 1? If so, then an artificial intelligence capable of accessing all the world’s information, discovering its own 0s, and turning them into 1s all on its own would hold staggering potential. Futurist Ray Kurzweil calls the moment an AI surpassing human intelligence is born the “technological singularity,” and says that no one can predict what the world looks like after that point — because humanity will have, in effect, created an entirely new kind of being. It’s a bit like how we can never fully understand the world of ants.

If love really can be explained through 0s and 1s, then perhaps we could also explain why Tereza and Tomas, or Franz and Sabina, were drawn to each other. What Tomas discovered in Tereza was something that had never been filled by the “erotic friendship” he had always chased; and what drew Franz to Sabina may have been her freedom — her drive to break away from homeland and convention — standing in such contrast to his own engaged, committed beliefs. A futurist would say there is some complex signal of 0s and 1s buried within all of that.

5

What does it mean to be alive? We rarely describe a life without change as “alive” — that feels closer to merely existing.

The human desire for a tomorrow better than today, for a better future, is what makes us more mature and stronger. This, I think, is what the author means by a “linear life.”

Karenin’s life, by contrast — life as a “moving machine” (machinae animatae) — might be seen as simply existing.

And yet, it’s also said that what happens only once is as good as never having happened at all. Whatever kind of life someone chooses, do we really have the right to casually judge another person’s life, or their love?

Living for the sake of a reward, hoping for compensation for one’s own life, is hard to call a wholly pure act. Even if that person is a great entrepreneur, or someone remembered for extraordinary achievements, they have merely satisfied the god of capitalism or the god of scholarship — and however much acclaim they receive, it’s hard to say for certain that they hold more value than an ordinary person. What’s more, if the only goal is that reward — expecting a return for the hardship of one’s own life — that mindset moves further away from purity. Values like fame or beauty carry, from the start, something of an illusion about them. They may be one form love takes, but they may also just be an unconscious impulse to pass better genes on to one’s offspring, rather than a fully rational judgment. Freud’s revelation of the unconscious made this perspective even clearer.

It’s hard to see someone who is excessively rational as pure — the same way we consider someone a snob if they judge a marriage prospect by scoring them on wealth, family background, ability, and looks, as if doing arithmetic. An emotional person, on the other hand, has room to be seen as pure. Even if their judgment is somewhat instinctive, they don’t approach people through calculation. That, precisely, is unconditional love — and it’s why Tereza and Karenin’s love can, in a sense, be called purer than her love for Tomas. Tereza accepted Karenin exactly as he was, and never tried to change him to fit her own wishes.

6

The unbearable lightness of being. Love may be nothing more than each of us projecting an illusion onto the god we each believe in. Seen this way, each of us is really seeking, in the other, the missing piece needed to complete the god we believe in. To call this subjective means that each of us is trying to obtain, from the other, the notes needed to finish our own musical score. All of us are filling in our own score, note by note, and just as a melody, once begun, doesn’t suddenly change midway, each of our lives tends to flow onward by its own inertia, without major upheaval. If a dramatic reversal does occur, it becomes, at times, something as singular as Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata.

Each of us composes our own score, but it isn’t necessarily written for anyone else. It is art for myself alone, and it stays with my life exactly as it is, disappearing only when I die.

The world holds countless pieces of music. There are fateful ones, like Beethoven’s symphonies; dazzling ones, like Liszt’s La Campanella; but there are also traditional folk songs and monotonous rounds. There are plagiarized melodies that merely copy another; songs filled with patriotism; minor-key pieces expressing despair; and, at times, something like John Cage’s 4'33".

Whatever the piece, it may be given an equal chance to be played. As for me, I want to listen to something like Beethoven’s Appassionata. And each of us will go on living out, and playing, our own different piece.

The world we each project comes entirely from within ourselves — much like a seed searching for a place to take root. Each of us is a seed of our own vital force, taking root in reality according to the world we each dream of. And that vital force is no different whether it belongs to a weed, a towering tree, or a human being. We are simply born in different forms, each living out a different dream.

The dream of every living being holds its own value, but existence itself is light. Life first appeared on Earth roughly 3.8 billion years ago; the universe itself is roughly 13.8 billion years old. Even if the Earth is one day consumed by the sun, the universe will remain, and somewhere, life will be born and vanish all over again. Our dreams sometimes resemble a parasite drawing nourishment from its host, and perhaps no being carries, in itself, some grand, inherent meaning or purpose. We simply enjoy our lives, carry life forward, and pass through the process of reproducing and fading away.

And yet, as long as there is life, there is hope. Hope is a privilege that only life gets to enjoy. In a world without life, things like hope or love would be nothing but illusions. It’s because there is life that love can exist, and that dreaming is possible at all. Nietzsche, seeing all this, would probably call it a process of wills to power winning and losing against one another — and just as winning an argument with a friend ten years ago leaves barely a trace on the world today, the struggles of living things, too, in the end, remain nothing more than a single story. The unbearable lightness of being — I suppose there’s simply no helping it.