milan kundera's the unbearable lightness of being

But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.” We perform this existential dance of yeses and nos to the siren song of one immutable question: How do we know what we want, what to want? Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922.

“Our lived lives,” wrote psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his magnificent manifesto for missing out, “might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. “Live as if you were living already for the second time,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his 1946 masterwork on the human search for meaning, “and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” And yet we only live once, with no rehearsal or reprise - a fact at once so oppressive and so full of possibility that it renders us, in the sublime words of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, “ill-prepared for the privilege of living.” All the while, we walk forward accompanied by the specters of versions of ourselves we failed to or chose not to become.

Milan kundera's the unbearable lightness of being