Yeah I know I’ve not been updating this blog of mine for a while now. Maybe I was just being plain lazy about having to crack my head to think of what to write. The fingers seemed lazy too and the weather has reached its punishing point.
Not that these days the weather is friendlier than it was months ago, but it is just that at times when the heat is so unbearable due to other factors not attributed to the weather itself, there is this certain itchiness that calls upon me to re-open this self-writing-and-reading session.
Writing a blog like this isn’t really meant for any reading audience. It is more like a monologue aimed at satisfying my own desire for expressing my personal thoughts and opinions about things according to my own whims and fancies.
Maybe I would pretend these entries were not written by me. They do not represent my thoughts in any way but of someone’s else. Only this way I would be free to explore the writer’s mind – without being bias and without fear or favour, as they said it.
Having said that, I don’t think the provisions in the Sedition Act is applicable to me in this instant because every piece of writing here is solely meant to be read by me and not about indoctrinating other people about anything, political or otherwise.
To shorten the story, as I must have known and most probably others too, Malaysia has been besieged by all kind of problems – political, judicial, economics et cetera ever since the last general election. This state of affair is pretty disturbing.
A couple of months back when I received the news on the three-month suspension of the bi-weekly tabloid Harakah, one of the many things that triggered my mind was the ‘idea of eternal return’ resurrected from the ancient Greek thinking by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Putting it simply, the idea of eternal return means that everything recurs as we once experience it (although in different forms), and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum or forever.
Now, this sheer thought of “eternal return” has caused Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to visit some compartment of my mind. Kundera explained the term ‘eternal return’ as: “Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.”
Kundera then went on to say: If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest burdens.
If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all the splendid lightness.
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives comes to the earth, the more real and the truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earthly being, and become half real, his movements as free as the are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
The “unbearable lightness of being” isn’t just about Tomas and Tereza (the main characters in the novel), isn’t just Kundera’s portrayal of the authoritarian government he once had to live with, but it is about us too.
Watch the following clip, and you will know what I mean.
