Lightness and Weight

By Rory McClannahan

There are many days when I feel like a time traveler stuck in the future who cannot return home.

I am not really one to get hung up in the past, wishing that I could go back in time and relive all those glory days, but when news comes of an old friend dying too young, I get to feeling disjointed and a little lost. A death tends to make us stop for a minute or two and contemplate our own lives.

Bobby died this week. Cancer. The first time I met Bobby was on the first day of the eighth grade. I was new to the school and the town and Bobby asked me outside the front door of the junior high school how long I was going to be in Eunice. I didn’t understand the question. I was pretty sure my father had moved us there for good, that it wasn’t a vacation (not that anyone would go to Eunice for a vacation). It seemed like an odd question to ask the new kid.

What I didn’t understand was that a lot of families came through Eunice for jobs that could last only a couple of months. So, the school population would be in constant flux. If I would have known at the time, I would have told Bobby that I would only be there for about three years.

I hadn’t talked directly to or even seen Bobby in at least 30 years. At the most, it has been more than 40 years because I’m unsure if he had been at the 10^th high school reunion I had attended. Even in our youth, I couldn’t say that he was a close friend – he was a guy I knew and liked well enough. Our relationship wasn’t one of close friendship in which we had shared our dreams and fears. When social media became a thing, I’d touched base with him enjoyed his posts of his travels and his dogs. I knew he played bass guitar in his church band and dearly loved his wife.

There was much I could speculate about his life because there are universal things we all go through. If he had told me about lost jobs, money stress, or losing a parent I would simply nod my head in agreement.

Oddly enough, I recently was going through photos on my phone with a friend who was interested in seeing a picture of my mom and whether I looked like her. As I was thumbing through the photos, there was one of yours truly when I was about 20. “You look so green, so naïve,” she said. I shrugged, I couldn’t argue. I’d yet to see all the crap that life tends to force a person to confront. As a fellow traveler on this planet, I know Bobby had felt all the weight and lightness that life has to offer.

To me, though, he will always be 16 years old with freckles and a pleasant disposition. It is hard to think of him as a 58-year-old man dying of cancer, but he was. Like I said, time travel. It messes with a person’s mind. According to existentialists like Sartre and Camus, that is actually a good thing. We should be reminded that our existence as a living, breathing human being with all the things that come with that should be constantly contemplated.

That’s where the other death this week comes in. The novelist Milan Kundera – a novelistic offspring of the existential movement – died this week at the age of 94. I was introduced to his work at about that same time the photo of that green, naïve kid was taken. I was trying my best to impress a smart girl who was not impressed with me. She liked me well enough, but I was a little too blue collar and rough around the edges for her taste. That was okay, I was rough around the edges, but, I guess, she decided that perhaps I had some promise. She gave me a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

To say a book can change a life seems hyperbole, but that book did change my life. I’ve read it probably a dozen times and my copy has folded back pages and underlined passages. Here’s one, chosen at random: “People usually escape from their trouble into the future; they draw an imaginary line across the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles will cease to exist.”

All the Kundera obituaries gave summations of this book, his most popular, as the story about the Prague Spring in 1968. While that was certainly part of the narrative, the book is a novel-length argument about the idea of Eternal Return and how that relates to a life lived in lightness or weight. The idea of Eternal Return – which was first argued about by the Greeks – is that the universe begins and ends and then starts all over again, and after each rebirth the universe unfolds just as it had before.

That means we are fated to live our lives over and over and over again and nothing ever changes. We are fated to live and be who we are. That kind of puts a damper on the notion of freewill, which is a good reason why a lot of folks do not buy into Eternal Return. This Eternal Return gives our lives weight, the burdens of obligations to our lives and the people in them. A value judgement is unnecessary, to some the burdens are what gives live meaning.

The lightness is represented by the idea that we only live one life and the decision of whether we take on burdens and obligations are required for a contented life. The main character in the book, Tomas, is conflicted between a life of lightness and weight.

I understand that conflict. I think we have all spent a lot of our lives living with lightness and weight, and wishing for the other. It is easy in our youth to live a life of lightness, I know I did. The future had no weight and many days were filled with moving from one meaningless relationship and party to the next.

Through the years, though, my life took on heaviness – career, wife, kids, taking care of an ill parent; you know the drill. I took on the heaviness willingly but there were times that I longed for those days of lightness. I’m not a huge believer in Eternal Return – I have fooled myself to believe just enough in freewill to think that I can change what I need to change. But I also believe in the weight of living – I happily take on the burdens in the belief that the load I take make life better for someone else.

Still, I sometimes long for those days of lightness when I expected nothing and nothing was expected of me. Bobby and many more people live in those days of lightness that exist now only in my memory, which has no meaning to anyone but myself.

That, my friends, is how you travel backwards in time.