Generations of college students have relished what they believe to be the wisdom of Milan Kundera’s words in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” since it was published in 1984.
Part novel, part philosophical exploration, the book captures the poignancy and plight of intellectuals in then-communist Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Prague Spring, when for a while it seemed possible that the Soviets might permit a measure of freedom there.
Alas, of course, Russian tanks rolled in to reimpose control and crush dissent — and that was that for another 21 years.
What undergraduates love most about the book is its central idea, that life is not a dress rehearsal. Kundera doesn’t actually spell this out, but he gets close enough to have inspired legions of young people:
“We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That’s why life is always a sketch.”
Kundera is hardly the first writer to have this insight — the TV soap opera “One Life to Live” predates him! — but one does not have to be wholly original to be inspiring.
Life is not a dress rehearsal, there are no do-overs, today is all we have, etc., and let a thousand motivational posters bloom.
But is it true? Is life not a dress rehearsal? Looking around this summer, I’m not so sure. There has been the distinct sense in my own household, widely echoed among friends, that, actually, we’re all rehearsing for a future that is not so far away as we would like to think.
I refer here to the phenomenon of one’s children growing up, leaving home, and moving away.
Every morning recently, for instance, a boy has walked past our house on his way to work. “Boy” is perhaps the wrong term for a fellow with almost a full beard, but when you’ve known a child since he was a third-grader it’s sometimes hard to adjust.
This young man has a real job this summer. Like any normal salaried worker, he gets up before he wants to, puts on a suit and tie, catches the bus, and spends his day under artificial lighting. What is he doing, if not running a dress rehearsal for adult life?
His parents, meanwhile, are rehearsing too. They’re practicing for the time when he is self-supporting, off in his own life, and no longer answerable to them.
A curious nostalgic silence prevails, meanwhile, in the houses of people who have exported their children either to sleep-away camp or to distant grandparents.
Having the children gone can at first feel bewildering: Is it really possible to just pop out and catch a movie without making sure that someone’s watching the children? Well, yes, it is. Yet how much you miss them.
This, I hear, is what it’s like when one’s children really are grown and gone: a bittersweet mix of freedom and loss.
Good thing that summertime gives us so much practice, for when the time comes.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mailto:[email protected] “>[email protected].
