By Stephanie K. Hopkins
In the first chapter of one of my favorite books, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Tomas watches Tereza, sick with fever, sleep. He met Tereza only weeks before, when she appeared in his life as if she were a child someone had put in a basket and “sent downstream for Tomas to fetch.” Tomas, whose life is defined by indecision, doesn’t know what to do with her—the force of his attraction is troubled by his fear of responsibility, the weight of this woman “offer[ing] him up her life.”
As Tomas watches her, he is struck with an overwhelming image: “And all at once he fancied she had been with him for many years and was dying. He had a sudden clear feeling that he would not survive her death. He would lie down beside her and want to die with her.”
Tomas names what happened as “love declaring itself to him.” He then snaps out of the fantasy and back into his vacillating limbo. Was it really love? he asks himself. Or was it simply hysteria?
Perhaps Tomas asks the wrong question as he looks out his Prague window onto a courtyard with dirty walls. Perhaps the real question is: To what extent is love itself hysterical?
In the sickroom of Tomas’ fantasy, love accelerates time. It offers up a vision of longevity—the fantasy of spending a lifetime with someone—while carrying with it a sense of panic: this person he has just met will die and leave him behind. Tomas’ vision reminds us that the seed of love is cruel—when it is most full of promise, it is also marked by its inevitable end.
We live with constant awareness of the end of things: the smell of barbeque that foretells the end of a summer even though it’s only July; that first bite of chocolate cake we can barely taste because we imagine the cake already gone; the bittersweet transitions of graduations, birthdays, new years. We search for clues of time passing as if they are scarce: a new wrinkle, a renegade gray hair, the night darker and fuzzier when driving, the ways our bodies move less easily than they used to. At the same time, we cling to what appears stable: a pair of jeans that still fits, a familiar landmark that hasn’t been torn down, rituals that offer comfort, hoping they will anchor us in the present and keep us from spinning too quickly into time’s cruel orbit.
And we fall in love against such an impossible backdrop. Under such conditions, how can love be anything but hysterical?
Shaking, dumbstruck, unable to eat or sleep, unable to stop ourselves, we focus on this person with the overwhelming precision of a heat-seeking missile. All the while speeding up time, hurrying the thing we want so desperately to preserve.
When love ends, when the thing we fear happens, what was disguised by hysteria reveals itself. I knew a relationship had ended when he no longer came after me. It was an absurd fight, me making him pull the car over, me running out into the snow without proper clothes or boots—running, running, running, but to where and away from what? Inside the shared hysteria of love, such dramatic acts seem reasonable; they are evidence of the magnitude of love.
The moment love is stripped of its intoxicating power is perhaps even more frightening then the weight of another’s life offered up to us. Love seems to mock us at such times. And yet, how can we not choose it again and again?
When we choose to love, we teeter on the edge of a precipice. Reason would tell us to step back, keep our distance. What we don’t realize is that distance is an illusion; the precipice is always there. But it is the precipice that reminds us that we are not in the frightening future; we are here now. Tereza only has the flu, and Tomas does not have to lie down beside her and die. Perched on the edge, we taste more, smell more, feel more. Summer will end, and July’s barbeque will taste better because of it. Time will pass and heighten our awareness of what matters. The dirty walls of a Prague courtyard will highlight the cozy room that overlooks them.
Maybe it’s a hysterical act to choose what we cannot keep, or count on, or measure, but it is also a powerful act, one that says this life matters.
Stephanie writes short stories, non-fiction, and young adult fiction. She recently finished a young adult novel, "Edge of Seventeen," and is working on a memoir about her adventures as an ex-professor turned bartender. You can reach her at stephaniehop@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter @stephaniehop1.
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