Lightness

"Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. 'Co-incidence' means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied by a local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and
take on its beauty."

--Milan Kundera "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

重讀這本書，讓我了解到為什麼會愛昆德拉，即使是未在接觸任何哲學、也沒有閃光經驗的時候，也許我一直以來都覺得人生混沌一片、沒有什麼邏輯、原則可言(lightness)，很多事情只是巧合；但是又因為人只能活一次，我們忍不住把很多的巧合賦予美感，迫切希望生命是有意義的(heaviness)。書中的主角各用不同的方式在lightness和heaviness間掙扎，似乎沒有一個是真正成功的。

"Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition".