On Eternity II: The Debate on Lightness and Weight between Kundera and Borges
I shot my first experimental film, THE IMMORTAL, in May 2023. In the film, the memories of nine mortal beings—a florist, a killer, a journalist, and others—break free from the shackles of time, converging into an infinite collective durée. Nine individual mortals thus become nine fragments of memory belonging to a single Immortal.
Yesterday afternoon, by chance, I came across a story of the same name in Borges’s collection The Aleph—'The Immortal.' Even more surprisingly, I found that Borges’s depiction of immortality aligned perfectly with my own: all knowledge was but remembrance, all novelty but oblivion—immortality, in essence, was the coexistence of countless mortals. Joseph Cartaphilus, the protagonist of Borges’s work, having attained eternal life, experienced every possible existence brought by every possible choice. At certain moments, he wrote The Odyssey; centuries later, he became Borges himself, writing this very novel.
Yet, just as I was immersed in the allure of eternity, Cartaphilus revealed its terrifying counterpart to me: an immortal being may become everyone, but he will never again be himself.
“Death (or reference to death) makes men precious and pathetic. Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent. Among the Immortals, every act (every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future, advertiginem. Nothing can occur but once, nothing is preciously in peril of being lost. The elegiac, the somber, the ceremonial are not modes the Immortals hold in reverence.”
It felt as if I were reading the script for the sequel to my film. I had every reason to believe that the Immortal at the end of my story would, like Cartaphilus, wander through endless centuries, dragging his weary, tormented body, searching for the river that could return him to mortality. For a brief moment, I shuddered—the joy that Eternal Return once evoked in me instantly vanished. Fortunately—fortunately—it remains only a hypothesis, a thought. Even the greatest happiness I can conceive now seems insufficient to prevent me from losing myself in endless repetition. The cycle in which immortality is trapped is not a transcendent experience beyond life and death but an irreversible exhaustion, a void eroded by infinite time—another form of the unbearable lightness of being, one Milan Kundera never imagined.
For a long time, I tried, as Kundera suggested, to endow my life with weight through faith in Eternal Return. But when time is no longer a linear experience and instead becomes an endless loop of repetition, this supposed heaviest weight dissolves into an empty echo. Could it be that the inevitability of death is what grants life its weight? Perhaps it is the one-time-only nature of this moment that makes every choice meaningful.
Mortals become restless in the face of their finitude, while the Immortals fade into insignificance through endless repetition. If finitude prevents the construction of meaning, infinity causes meaning to dissolve. My favorite writer, Borges, has unexpectedly positioned himself in opposition to both Kundera and Nietzsche. And here I am, having just written all of this, lost between them, unsure where the weight of life should be placed.