leaned her head on Tomas's shoulder. Just as she had when they flew together in the airplane through the storm clouds. She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together (313).
However, even after this brief interlude of happiness in the overriding sadness, the two separate, Tereza dances drunkenly and wantonly with two other men. Glimpses of happiness may be seen, but Kundera has obviously created a world for Tomas and Tereza in which those glimpses are not meant to be understood as some sort of romantic salvation from abandonment, from the unbearable lightness of being in a world without faith or transcendent attachment.
Love and sex in the novel, particularly for Tomas and Tereza, are meant by Kundera to be seen as a temporary weight holding the individual to the earth, to reality, even to sanity. Kundera questions the conventional belief that heaviness is undesirable and lightness is desirable:
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become (5).
Tomas and Tereza, then, seek the weight or heaviness or burden of love and sex, especially in a world in which religion and politics and philosophy no longer hold them down, no longer can be believed in. This is one of the great paradoxes of love and sex for Kundera and his characters. The main characters seek the weight of love to hold them to the earth, but at the same time they are retreating from the world into the burden of love and sex. The world threatens them with the unbearable lightness of b...