The Unbearable Heaviness of Return

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera was the novel that introduced me to the idea of eternal return. I first read it in Naples, which is where my new novel is set; the copy I read belonged to the lovely woman I met while there.

What struck me is when the narrator states in the opening chapters: “If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross.” I remember remembering the moment I read that line. I was in the rundown apartment of that lovely woman. She sat next to me in the bed she welcomed me to share for the time I had left in Naples before returning to the States, which at that point could be any day now. A strange intimacy came about because of that constraint in time, that pressure to try to jam as much human connection in every moment before I returned to the life that awaited me in the States, and she returned to the life of an entraîneuse.

I remember remembering her being topless and her toes looking like cracked TV screens, and how frayed her panties looked, and the crumbs on her bare chest as she ate a sandwich, then her turning to look at me and say in her accented English, “What? I’m hungry.”

Approaching what the narrator states as a thought experiment, if every second of my life recurs an infinite number of times, I want to be nailed to that moment for eternity.

In pushing this thought experiment further out, if every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times and that moment becomes what we are nailed to, wouldn’t it make sense to make it so that there would be no regret in the cross we are to bear?

Here’s another moment that I’m unfortunately nailed to: on the first day of my son starting his freshman year of high school, he called home and asked if he could stay out later. He had been on punishment for the kind of troubles a teenage boy would give his parents, and he wanted to know if I could make an exception for that day; a girl he had a crush on had asked him to go to the library with her. He understood he was being punished, especially for how callous he had become to his sisters, yet he needed the exception. It is that callousness to his sisters that had me tell him, “No. Come home.”

He begged. He pleaded.

I held firm, thinking it was my job as his father to teach him the same way my father had taught me.

That was the day something in him seemed to have given up and we became adversaries and it took years for me to get him back.

I am part of two therapy groups: one for those of us battling cancer. The other, for those of us who survived sexual trauma. In the cancer group, regret is talked about more than fear. In the sexual trauma group, the second-guessing of ourselves is talked about more than the moment of violation. It is the cross. It is heavy. So damn heavy.

Speaking for myself, I wish I could have told my son, “Yes, you may go.” I wish I had not gone to the Love Parade in 2001 and had stayed in my hotel room instead.

I had someone ask me why I am part of the latter group when all my focus should be on the former, to which I said something to the effect of “Because going forward, the new memories I hope to form in the many moments of life I do have ahead of me, I want to make sure they’re as pleasant as the moments I shared with my entraîneuse, where there would be no regret, there would be no second-guessing, especially since the idea of eternal return is no longer an idea.”

At least for me.

It has become a consequence.

Because my battle with cancer has flatlined my hormones, and because the fog that came about exacerbates a preexisting injury, which I’ve been told is focused on the left frontal and medial temporal regions of my brain, I have been reliving every second of my life an infinite number of times.

This has had an impact on everything, including the novel I had been writing and I had just finished. It has made me more guarded with time, how I spend it, and who I spend it on.

This is the question I hope you will be asking of yourself: Have you had moments in your life you are happy to be nailed to? In living your life, would you be happy to be nailed to moments where you reacted with anger instead of calm? Are you living in a way that, should you find yourself in a room filled with men and women mourning over the moments they are unfortunately nailed to, you’d find you’re nailed to good moments, because you’d lived your life without regret?

I don’t regret eating a large crumb from in between the breasts of the entraîneuse who inspired the female protagonist in the novel.

The novel has become my eternal return.