Intersecting Worlds and Newtonian Physics

If you, oh so welcome trespasser, had ever for a moment doubted my nerdiness, the time has come for me to prove myself, to demonstrate just how deeply rooted it is, how after 2 years of leaving that place, it is still in me. Below is an essay on Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I've included scrap paper and everything. Don't read if if you just saw the movie.

Intersecting Worlds and Newtonian Physics
By Clara Ng

“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.” (Kundera, 48) Chance can bring love, but whether it’s seen as a blessing or a curse depends on the individual. In Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being Tomas and Tereza had a hard time finding marital bliss, due largely in part to differences in opinion of chance. It is not so much that chance has brought them different things, but that the perception of chance has the effect of altering their evaluation, or the weight, of love. The reason for this cannot be blamed on them though, since they are only victims to their environment, an environment that I’ll argue may be on different planets.
Let us try to visualize the world Kundera describes, where coincidences are weighed heavily. We often see the world in three dimensions, the dimensions of space, in length, width, and height, x, y and z, respectively. Yet to form a narrative, we must take into consideration the fourth dimension, of time, or for our purposes, α. If we consider each life as a line segment on the axis of time, then our location is given as an intersection of the special intersection, or the point (x, y, z) on the axis α. And as Kundera states, there is no eternal return, so we move linearly on the α axis with our point on spatial plane, (x, y, z, α) where α is increasing.
Meeting in Kundera’s world, where the cyberspatial plane and the changes in time that come along with it does not yet exist, involves the sharing of all these points, or a close proximity anyways, since two beings can’t occupy the same exact space; i.e. given (x1, y1, z1, α) and (x2, y2, z2, α), the values of x1-x, y1-y, z1-z2 are negligible and α is common. If we assume that love involves at least the conditions of a meeting, if not also some metaphysical intersection of frequencies, then coincidence, or “co-incidence” (Kundera, 50) is a prerequisite.
Kundera’s characters weigh coincidence heavily, in that they taking it into account led them to look at their love differently; As if, coincidence was a force that acted on love independently. Tomas, a long time womanizer, met Tereza, his future wife through six fortuities. Though he loved her, he was unable to stay faithful. This caused Tereza pain, which she was quite vocal about. He found himself conflicted between feelings of guilt and with doubts about their relationship. He often thought that “the love story of his life exemplified not ‘Es muss sein!’ (It must be so), but rather ‘Es konnte auch anders sein’ (It could just as well be otherwise)” (Kundera, 34); As if, were not for the coincidences of their meeting, Tereza could easily have loved someone else and he would easily of continued his lifestyle from bed to bed. His predicament is quite paradoxical. He is making light of Tereza’s love, considering it only a product of coincidence, while at the same time being weighed down by guilt.
To Tomas, the increase in the preconditions of their love, or the increase in the force of coincidence, c, has a reciprocal relationship with the weight of love, l, i.e. as c increases, l decreases. Since weight, W, is a force, F, and force equals mass m times acceleration a, then weight, at equilibrium, without any other force acting on it, is mass times acceleration due to gravity g; i.e. F = ma and W = mg. c is deemed heavy in the case of six fortuities, since six is certainly more significant that one or in most cases none. If m is constant, g must increase. The intersection or near intersection of (x1, y1, z1, α) and (x2, y2, z2, α) is therefore due to an actual gravitational pull which exists at that specific point in time α.
Tereza, on the other hand, also saw the coincidences, but to her they gave her love weight. When she met Tomas, she heard Beethoven play on the radio.
She associated Beethoven with the world outside of her little town, what she had passion for. The fact that Tomas appeared with her audio representation of happiness and beauty, only confirmed her love and increased its weight. She views her love as heavy, as demonstrated by her absolute dependence on Tomas. Therefore, in Tereza’s world, c and l had a direct relationship, as c increases, so does l.
In both cases, only considering l as the love Tereza has for Tomas, we find that Tomas’ weight of it, l1 is different from Tereza’s weight of her love, l2; i.e. , l1 ≠ l2. In Tomas’ world, c and l have a reciprical relationship and in Tereza’s world c and l have a direct relationship. Since c is constant in both since their meeting was a shared event, at the same time α, then it is a force that acts on them in the same way and need not be considered. Even though equilibrium, where an outside force is not present does not exist, due to c, we can discount it since it acts on both people the same way; e.g. given two 25 kg. boxes if you placed on each a 10 kg. box, the weight of both stacks will still be equal. For l1 < l2, or for Tomas to weigh Tereza’s love less than she weighs it, while still following the formula l = mg, with the invisible mass of Tereza’s love (whose mass must exist, since it has weight, because l = mg = 0, given m = 0), then g must be different for Tereza and Tomas.
Weight is relative. We notice that our weight seems to change as we go up and down on an elevator for instance, but that doesn’t seem the case with Tereza and Tomas. There doesn’t seem to be a separate force pushing them up or down or otherwise. Obviously, they don’t have the exact same experiences and perhaps Tomas’s strenuous extramarital activities act as another mysterious force, but let us not suppose that every single action changes weight. Extramarital affairs don’t usually affect weight (unless you are Omar Khayyam of Salman Rushdie’s Shame, of course). And even if Tomas’ actions affect Tereza’s love, the object being measured is still the same and should weigh the same to both. As already mentioned, in this case, the difference of weight has to do with the difference in g. It is known that our weight on other planets or on the moon is different, due to the difference in the acceleration due to gravity. If g is different then Tomas and Tereza must be on different worlds.
I must admit, that all this depends largely on the assumption that both Tomas and Tereza are logical individuals able to perceive weight accurately. I know that the assumption that individuals are logical is a rather large one to make, but Tomas is a man of science and medicine after all and to assume Tereza is any less logical in something as simple as weight perception, just because she is a stay at home wife, is nothing less than sexist. This would not be the first time that different worlds collided in a postmodern novel. Perhaps it has even been foreshadowed in Sabina’s art, of one world hidden in another. Perhaps, unlike Sabina and Franz, the problem isn’t due to simple disagreement on semantics (there’s nothing particularly postmodern about that after all), but rather a difference in planetary origin. Or perhaps Kundera would disagree emphatically. After all he wrote: “Necessity knows no magic formulae – they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.” (Kundera, 49) How fortuitous it is indeed, for people of different world’s to fall in love.

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.








SCRAP PAPER¬ and REFERENCE FORMULAS
F Force
W weight
m mass
a acceleration
g acceleration due to gravity
l weight of love
c force of coincidence

Given:
F = ma
W = mg
l = mg
m1 = m2; i.e. mass of love constant is constant in both worlds
l1 < l2

Then: l1 < l2 = mg1 < mg2 and g1 ≠ g2

webs

Yet... another blog... another network... When I am gone, all that will be left are these strange cyber artifacts. Not even, perhaps since I'm told that these companies delete accounts post mortem. But how twistedly fortuitous would it be for a kindred eyes to pass on this line, when there are approaching infinitely others.