Early in the morning of the last Friday in April 1989, I found myself trying to sleep very early in the morning (as the sun just began to shine) in a nearly empty train chugging up through Bavaria to the Czechoslovakian border.
As the train rolled to a stop on the German side of the border, a German guard came into my cabin to check my passport. Later, a Czechoslovakian border patrol entered the train and took my passport—apparently to check it and then to stamp it for me.
As I stood in the hallway in front of my cabin waiting for the Czechoslovakian border patrol to return, the man in the next cabin began telling me nervously his own unforgettable narration.
The man stated that he could no longer live in the West and its system.
The man was also obviously home-sick for family and familiar places where he had grown up just across the German border in his homeland.
This middle-aged man was from Czechoslovakia and had only fled to the West several years before. For a few years, he had lived with an aunt along with other Czech exiles and emigrants in Munich--working as a taxi-driver and doing odd jobs, but all-in-all just eking out a living.
After several years of trying to make it living in the West, this middle-aged man—now nervously smoked a cigarette. He made it clear that he had weighed his options and had determined that it would be best for him to return to live with his own family back in Czechoslovakia.
The man observed soberly, “This day, I don’t know what will happen. Perhaps, I will be put in jail when they identify me as a Czechoslovakian national who has overstayed his permit abroad by several years.” Click here.
It didn’t matter too this Czech male much any more.
The man assured me that he was ready to pay the price to be reunited with his family and his homeland.
His melancholy was like those shared by the characters in the classic film (1988), THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, based on the book of the same title by Milan Kundera. Click here.
In Kundera’s novel, the author is in constant dialectic with Friedrich Nietzsche.
The illusion (and the illusoriness) of the “Grand March” is discussed. For Kundora’s character Franz, the “Grand March” is the belief that history brings progress and positive progress in human existence.
Living is considered “light” by Kundora because one is faced with faced with either trying to give in to ones dreams and scratching out the reality of history. For Kundora, history is simply a straight line where nothing really repeats, and, therefore, if one were to live one’s life over, it would not be better.
In summary, this is the melancholic sense of “lightness” referred to by Kundera in the title of his book. We step on each point in history only once. The river continues on but we are not on the same point on the line when we step on it a second time.
On the other hand, if we were the same person who stepped into the changing river at the same point in time, then the fate or destiny of such a linear river would simply have us repeat the path we had taken before (with all our errors)—never really achieving the illusory progress we would seek on repeat (games) attempts to play out our lives’ differently.
