Maybe We Can Begin

When I was in college I read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being partially because it was the favorite book of some girl I wanted to impress and partially because it seemed like the kind of book the person I was trying to make myself into — erudite, deep-thinking, artistic — should be reading. It opens, as I recall, with the main character, Tomas, gazing longingly out of a window trying to decide between two paths. The problem, Kundera points out, is that this man has never taken either of these paths before. He does not know what will happen if he does either. So in the truest sense, he is faced with the…