Tomas has made a major decision in remaining with Tereza. In making that decision he has chosen a path. Now he faces another major decision, that of retracting a statement against the authorities that will cost him his position at the hospital if he chooses not to do so. These are major choices, ones that require consideration of outcome, though even the smallest choices in life, like going to the gas station before going to the bank hold the possibility of great change.
At this point I reread the back cover, which succinctly lays down the theory of "lightness of being":
In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
And yet we have Tomas making decisions of import, of weight; ones that will change his life forever. He can remain a surgeon, with the government’s shadowed threat of revelation, or he must leave and find a job elsewhere, branded an enemy of the state. Certainly life changing. Only one path can be taken, parallel choices do not exist. One would think that the choice then bears considerable weight by its impact on his life.
It may be difficult to understand the idea that in fact the decision made one way or the other is indeed meaningless, weightless. But if you consider that only one or the other can exist, the one that is chosen is no more meaningful than the one rejected, as their values were equal before the decision was made, and just as one was chosen and the other was passed, either could have been selected, making the other the ‘unselected’ and so both still have the value of being meaningless.
It’s an interesting principle of life, and it would be eye-opening I’m sure to spend a couple days applying it to all choices faced. It’s the Principle of Whatever…
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology