The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Part 1, Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

Beethoven, the narrator says, considered weight positive, unlike Parmenides. The “weighty resolution” of Beethoven’s quartet describes Fate, and it implies that only that which is heavy has any real value. Tomas crosses the border into Czechoslovakia and is met with Russian tanks. “Es muss sein!” he says to himself again. Tomas knows that staying in Zurich without Tereza would have been unbearable, but he wonders how long this feeling would have lasted. A week? A month? His entire life? He doesn’t know, and since his life occurs only once, the narrator says, Tomas has no way of knowing.