By Sean Cotter

the unbearable lightness of being

the unbearable lite-ness of being

the unbearable blightness of being

the unbearable nice™ness of being

the unbearable “like”ness of being

Milan Kundera opposed using "the unbearable lightness of being" to title the English translation of his Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, even though it is relatively close to the Czech original. “I realize that for you Americans the title will be a bit hard-going," Kundera states in Michael Heim's account,

“so we can try something else,” and he suggested one of the chapter titles: “Karenin’s Smile.” I protested. “We’re not children,” I told the editor. “If The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the title, so be it.” And so it stayed. [Adriana Babeţi, "A Happy Babel," Iowa Review]

Heim's translation, like a spot of dye, dropped into the flow of culture and altered the hue of English as it diffused downstream. A meme before memes, the breadth of this title's reach lets us see something we know is true but can rarely prove: translation choices transform our language and our experience of the world. The list in this essay is drawn from internet and library catalog searches of article, chapter, blog, and book titles for variations on the translation.

the unbearable lightness of meaning

the unbearable lightness of acting

the unbearable lightness of community

the unbearable lightness of exodus

the unbearable lightness of sight

the unbearable lightness of games

the unbearable lightness of the climate change industrial complex

the unbearable lightness of anthropology

Heim's gallant defense of American intellectual pride has been seconded, and thirded, and thousandthed, by writers who fit their own titles into the algebra of these abstract words. It has become an English given, a linguistic formula like Raymond Carver's "what we talk about when we talk about [x]" or R. F. C. Hull's "zen and the art of [x]." The English words that Heim poured into the Czech original have become the form where other authors cast their words.

the unbearable wine-ness of being a light

the unbearable busy-ness of being

the unbearable rambo-ness of being

the unbearable sade-ness of being

the unbearable panda-ness of being

the unbearable stuff-ness of being

the unbearable khaki-ness of being

the unbearable bro-ness of being

the unbearable wasp-ness of being

the unbearable clown-ness of being

the unbearable madness of being

Falling somewhere between pun and prayer, each repetition explores a possible application of the translated title to a new topic. En masse, they offer a visual, graphic testament to Heim's intuition of American culture and literary value. In a series, they twist and pull the English, exposing its formal characteristics and cultural potential through reversals, unraveling, decomposition, and play.

the unbearable wholeness of being

the unbearable sassiness of being

the unbearable loudness of being

the unbearable eroticism of being

the unbearable awkwardness of being

the unbearable sadness of being sad

the unbearable darkness of being

the unbearable randomness of being

the unbearable dourness of being

the unbearable lightness of Elizabeth Bishop

the unbearable lightness of "the 'n' word"

the unbearable lightness of new urbanism

the unbearable lightness of retirement

the unbearable lightness of incessant change

the unbearable lightness of dragons

These variations are a feature of the English translation, not the original. Czech writers do not vamp on Kundera, a fact explained in part by the delayed publication of the Czech version. Although it appeared in an edition from Josef Škvorecký’s 68 Publishers in Toronto in 1985, the book was not published in the Czech Republic until 2006, twenty-two years after the English translation. When Czech plays on the title do appear, therefore, they are translations of the English-language practice of riffing.

unbearable lightness

the incredible lightness of laughing

the incredible lightness of be(coming) a cyclist

the unbareable lightness of being wrong

the wearable lightness of being

the infinite lightness of being

the unbeatable lightness of being

the eternal lightness of being

the exquisite lightness of being

the divine lightness of being

the uncomfortable lightness of being

the un-bear-able lightness of being

the un-bear-able lightness of equity

the un”bear”able lightness of “bee”ing

the un-bear-able lightness of being...stupid

the un"bear"able lightness of being in Berlin

the un"bear"able lightness of bear

the un-burj-able lightness of being

The formula "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (TULOB) contains three points of variation (x, y, z) with an optional finale (q). To plot it mathematically requires three axes and an additional dimension for the final fillip, so its complexity suggests three-dimensional space plus time. If we isolate one variable, "the unbearable lightness of [z]," we may use Google's Ngram reader to search its corpus of scanned books published in English in a particular year. The TULOB variations occupy more ground than comparable phrases. In 2000, "the unbearable lightness of" accounts for 101 x 10-9 (0.00000101) percent of the text in the Ngram corpus, while "zen and the art of" produces just 8 x 10-9 % and "what we talk about when" 17 x 10-9 %. Shakespearean phrases do no better: "all that glistens" comes in at 5, "the game's the thing" at 6, and "out damned spot" at 12 x 10-9 %. We have to turn to Biblical comparisons to find serious contenders. "In the beginning" scores 569, while variations on "thou shalt not" chalk up 1564.

the unbearable nonsense of being

the unbearable obsessiveness of being

the unbearable lightness of being polar rays

the unbearable lightness of boredom

this unbearable boredom of being

the unbearable brightness of Beane

the unbearable rightness of stealing

the unbearable lightness of tagging

the unbearable brightness of Boeing

the unbearable weirdness of being

the unbearable tightness of vision

the unbearable lateness of being

Ngrams reveal another oddity. We might expect the presence of "the unbearable lightness of" to boom with the publication of the translated novel (1984) and the popularity of the movie (1988) and to wane as years pass. The opposite, however, is the case: through 2000, the frequency of "the unbearable lightness of" is rising.

the unbearable lightness of politics

the unbearable rightness of Beijing

the unbearable rightness of indecision making

the unbearable lightness of Syria policy

the unbearable whiteness of pro-lifers and pundits

the unbearable tightness of voting

the unbearable tightness of being in a monetary union

the unbearable rightness of Beijing

the incredible lightness of Obama

the unbearable heaviness of the left-wing blogger

the incredible lightness of Obamalove

the unbearable heaviness of Obama's ego

the unbearable heaviness of being Newt Gingrich

the incredible lightness of being Dick Cheney

the incredible lightness of being Thomas Friedman

the incredible lightness of being Roger Federer

the unbearable lightness of being Jim Douglas

the unbearable brightness of being a Mets fan

the unbearable lightness of being Sam Querrey

the unbearable whiteness of cheerleading

the unbearable triteness of skiing

the unbearable hotness of Eli Manning

Two fields share exceptional devotion to plays on the title: sports and politics. What is their connection? Both demand important, often hurried decisions regarding complicated information, and both subject these decisions to lengthy scrutiny by Monday-morning quarterbacks and armchair generals. Commentators in both fields are motivated to find their leaders' fallibility, their lightness, particularly unbearable. Perhaps such tension generates a spiritual need.

the unbearable rightness of Bush v. Gore

the unbearable wrongness of Bush v. Gore

the unbearable rightness of Marbury v. Madison

the unbearable slightness of being Joe Klein

the unbearable whiteness of being GOP

the unbearable whiteness of being the Democrat convention

the incredible lightness of John Kerry

the incredible lightness of being in charge

These writers' appeals to TULOB offer a moment, if only in the title, to link the wound of disappointment to a greater statement about existence. By raising their topics to the level of "being," the harshly ephemeral problems of football and policy are diluted into the eternal. The opposite may be more accurate: the structure generates the titles. Would so many writers make claims about "being" if they were not provided a pattern for doing so? The algorithm of the title generates metaphysicians out of sportswriters and wonks.

the ineffable lightness of being

the unboreable lightness of being

the unknowable lightness of being

the unbearable anxiety of being Ken

the unbearable inevitability of being android

the unbearable brightness of seeing

the unbearable brightness of speaking

the unbearable being of Sasquatch

the unbearable meh-ness of being

The phrase appeals in its peculiar, modern rhetoric. In contrast to a classical formulation, which would increase the length of terms over the series (as in, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"), TULOB decreases: its main terms have three syllables, two, and two. The last word even violates the pattern of descending length. It might want to be just "be," in one syllable, if a masculine ending were not too old-fashioned for an anti-classical formula. The history of the phrase is ambivalent, evincing some regret for ending on an unaccented syllable. One-syllable substitutions are common.

the unbearable slightness of Bean

the unbearable whiteness of Dean

the unbearable brightness of bling

the unbearable sadness of zilch

the unbearable triteness of clam

the unbearable triteness of love

the unbearable heaviness of truth

the unbearable heaviness of slate

the unbearable lightness of scones

If scansion shows some strangeness to the phrase, it also reveals the translation's kinship with the English language. TULOB is built on anapests (the un béar a ble líght ness of bé ing), a pattern as common as the feminine endings in "'twas the night before Christmas."

the unbearable stiffness of being

the unbearable tallness of being

the unbearable cuteness of being

the unbearable straightness of being

the unbearable smartness of being

the unbearable lightness of painting

the unbearable numbness of being

the unbearable whiteness of being human

the unbearable "whiteness" of being Jewish

the unbearable likeness of being a tourist

the unbearable light-ness of being a spammer

the unbearable lightness of being Quaker

The story of the English title begins with prophetic unintelligibility. Heim recalls, "The editor who commissioned me to do the translation first heard the title over a bad transatlantic phone connection from Kundera in French. All he could make out was that it consisted of three abstract words." The list of permutations suggests that everyone, from Tony Judt (“The Unbearable Lightness of Politics,” in Ill Fares the Land) to Slavoj Žižek (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being No One,” in The Parallax View) to Portia de Rossi (Unbearable Lightness, her memoir), has heard the title in translation over a bad transatlantic phone connection.

the unbearable Italian-ness of being Chinese

the unbearable Eliot Ness-ness of Inspector Walpin

the unbearable chic-ness of Daphne Guinness

on the unbearable uselessness of Mother Wisdom

the unbearable rightness of catastrophizing

the incredible lightness of being “crime fighter” Alonzo Washington

the unbearable burden of being a Bulgarian voter abroad

the incredible lightness of being at an Eco-Lodge in Algonquin Park

Everyone has heard what she wanted in the three abstract words, everyone has heard Kundera's capacious algebra speaking to her ear. And perhaps people imagine Kundera is the one calling, no matter what the topic at hand, to offer accommodation within the literary world.

the unfuckable lightness of being

the incredible lightness of boinking

the unbearable hotness of dong

the unbearable heaviness of boobs

the unbearable hotness of fucking

Most of the stems of permutation include a sexual or scatological version.

the unbearable brightness of peeing

the unbearable rightness of peeing

the unbearable tightness of peeing

the incredible lightness of peeing

the unbearable triteness of weeing

the unbearable shit-ness of being

the unbearable shite-ness of being

the unbearable whiteness of pooing

the unbearable heaviness of being divine shit

The corollary to cultural accommodation is the joyful perversion of high culture into low. The reversal is not a betrayal of the original; in fact, the title is built around opposite terms, the paradox of "unbearable lightness." That tautness gives more energy to the title than to the novel itself, which explains the paradox away. The title has more readers than the novel, and it generates more writers. As its spring uncoils, however, it produces other, less tense variations: "bearable lightness" is simply an explanation; "unbearable heaviness" is not an opposition but an exaggeration.

the bearable lightness of being a laptop

the bearable lightness of being Orthodox

the bearable lightness of being in Noosa

the Blairable lightness of being

the bearable lightness of being

the beerable lightness of being

the unbearable heaviness of luggage

the unbearable heaviness of Claudia's backpack

the unbearable heaviness of trauma

the unbearable heaviness of humankind

the unbearable heaviness of skin and bone

the unbearable heaviness of being human

the unbearable heaviness of being Muslim

the unbearable heaviness of being Czech

the unbearable heaviness of being…Lebanese

the unbearable heaviness of being Armenian in Turkey

the unbearable heaviness of being no one

the unbearable heaviness of being Misbah-ul-Haq

the unbearable heaviness of being…poor

the unbearable heaviness of being 'k'

the unbearable heaviness of being a child

the unbearable heaviness of being in India

the unbearable heaviness of being in the closet

the unbearable heaviness of being in eighteenth-century studies

the unbearable heaviness of being the parent of a toddler

the unbearable heaviness of being

the unbearable heaviness of not being

"Unbearable whiteness" is one of many variations that replace a paradox with something actually intolerable.

the unbearable whiteness of being

the unbearable whiteness of being an Andrews character

the unbearable whiteness of breaking things

the unbearable whiteness of urban farming

the unbearable whiteness of eating

the unbearable whiteness of green

the unbearable whiteness of emceeing

the unbearable whiteness of Barbie

the unbearable whiteness of alternative food

the unbearable whiteness of suicide

the unbearable whiteness of Ken Burns

the unbearable whiteness of white meat

the unbearable whiteness of craft brewing

the unbearable whiteness of college

the unbearable whiteness of tving

the unbearable whiteness of Portland

the unbearable whiteness of cable

the unbearable whiteness of Brothers Tsarnaev

the unbearable whiteness of the Irish

the unbearable whiteness of Slovaks

the unbearable whiteness of Piet-ing

the unbearable whiteness of skiing

the unbearable whiteness of (my) being

the unbearable whiteness of literacy instruction

"the" unbearable "whiteness" of "science"

Only this principle of relaxation can explain the heap of "incredible lightnesses," the replacement of "unbearable" with a word that, due to overuse and imprecision, means almost nothing at all.

the incredible lightness of being

the incredible lightness of being transparent

the incredible lightness of being focused

the incredible lightness of being in Paris

the incredible lightness of being in Hollywood

the incredible lightness of being Tucker Carlson

the incredible lightness of being Tabu Ley Rochereau

the incredible lightness of part-time investing

the incredible lightness of boxes

the incredible lightness of ... electronics

the incredible lightness of metal art

the incredible lightness of "no labels"

the incredible lightness of bees

the incredible lightness of Biden

the incredible lightness of drawing

the incredible lightness of modernity

the incredible lightness of metapages

the incredible lightness of bee-ing

the incredible lightness of Maddy

the incredible lightness of eating

the incredible lightness of seeing

the incredible lightness of bussing

the incredible lightness of buy-side volume

the incredible lightness of the U. S. media

the incredible lightness of the S&P 500

the incredible lightness of Beene

the incredible lightness of soaring sculpture

the incredible lightness of flying

the incredible lightness of Die Fledermaus

the incredible lightness of being wrong

the incredible lightness of simplicity

the incredible lightness of learning

the incredible lightness of the Chron's pre-season Texans coverage

the incredible lightness of being a dinosaur

the incredible lightness of the universe

the incredible lightness of moving

the incredible lightness of an empty basket

the incredible lightness of beams

the incredible lightness of cycling

the incredible lightness of Beaujolais

the incredible lightness of traveling

the incredible lightheadedness of being German

the incredible lightness of the Washington Post

the incredible lightness of beekeeping

the incredible lightness of being a violinist

the incredible lightness of fishing

the incredible lightness of being (someone else)

the incredible lightness of being polite

the incredible lightness of bel canto

the incredible lightness of beano

the incredible lightness of being the Grateful Dead

the incredible lightness of light

the incredible lightness of decluttering

the incredible lightness of living in an uncluttered home

the incredible lightness of the Ottawa press corps

the incredible lightness of white

the incredible lightness of being a car

One subcategory of permutation has a heartbreakingly high frequency: being as unbearably lonely. The word "loneliness" does not fit easily into the space of "lightness." It is one syllable too long. The extra syllable almost completely impedes the title, making it wallow in the moment of loneliness. Then, once we make it through the word, loneliness turns out not to be a moment, but an eternal condition.

the unbearable loneliness of being

the unbearable loneliness of being homo sapiens

the unbearable loneliness of being Bibi

the unbearable loneliness of being sick

the unbearable loneliness of being (here)

the unbearable loneliness of being the coat check girl

the unbearable loneliness of being wrong

the unbearable loneliness of cacti

TULOB strips "being" of any brave existential gesture, to reveal its redundancy: loneliness is the permanent state of being, being reduces to loneliness. Loneliness turns the title into a chiasmus. Yet this conclusion is challenged by the frequency of another variation: affixing a proper name to the end. In these versions, an actual being appears, just past "being" itself. We would find a person, if only we could make it through the preceding words.

the unbearable lightness of being Stanley Fish

the unbearable rightness of being Stephen Harper

the unbearable triteness of being Teddy Greenstein

the unbearable brightness of being Erica Angeline

the unbearable brightness of being Ken

the unbearable lightness of Ezra Klein

the unbearable slightness of being (Oprah)

the unbearable burden of being Robert

the unbearable ennui of being Sherlock Holmes

the unbearable heaviness of Nitin Gadkari

the unbearable politeness of Sheen

the unbearable brightness of Bunny

the unbearable politeness of Daniel Day-Lewis

the unbearable hotness of Andrew McCarthy

the unbearable rightness of being Nancy

the unbearable rightness of Padma

the incredible lightness of Tim Roth

The proper names compliment the variations trapped in loneliness. One calls to the other across the chiastic miasma. The co-presence of these two sets of variations suggests that the difference between loneliness and the lightness of human contact is a single syllable.

the unattainable lightness of being

the unbearable triteness of boum

the unbeatable lightness of being Florida

the uncomfortable lightness of being unemployed

the aerodynamic lightness of being

the surprising lightness of being a hijabi

the amazing lightness of being

the healing lightness of being

the implacable lightness of being

the imaginary lightness of being pregnant

the unbreakable lightness of being

the unforgettable lightness of being

the unavoidable lightness of being an amoeba

the barely imagined lightness of being

the terrible lightness of being

the pleasurable lightness of being

the unbookable lightness of being

the unbearable weight of being

the bear-able lightness of being

the beer-able lightness of being

the unbeard-able lightness of being

the underwear-able lightness of being

the unblairable lightness of being

the unbearable burden of being mentally ill

the unbearable burden of living life in reverse

the unbelievable lightness of being club

the incredible lightness of being an openly gay artist

the unbearable brightness of being

the unbearable brightness of being the world's greatest cinema

the unbearable brightness of the uncanny

the unbearable brightness of spring

the unbearable burden of doing

the unbearable burden of forgetting

the unbearable burden of history

the unbearable burden of ID papers

the unbearable brightness of dreaming

the unbearable brightness of Beijing

the unbearable brightness of the neoconservatives

the unbearable brightness of incredible stupidity

the unbearable brightness of weaving

the unbearable rightness of being

the unbearable rightness of being certain

the unbearable rightness of being green

the unbearable rightness of being armed

the unbearable rightness of being stupid

the unbearable rightness of being wrong

the unbearable rightness of maybe being wrong

the unbearable rightness of being happy

the unbearable tightness of bad jeans

the unbearable tightness of pants

the unbearable tightness of corset

the unbearable tightness of marmalade

the hilarious lightness of being

Michael Heim is laughing: "The unbearable lightness of this and the unbearable lightness of that. I laugh when I run across newspaper headlines adopting the formulation." The history of permutations offers delight to punsters and others who enjoy the free play of language, who take pleasure in the slightness of a one-letter shift to or from lightness.

the unbearable fatness of being

the unbearable phatness of being

The game resembles other techniques of formal translation, particularly those devised by the Oulipo: homophonic translations, or substitutions of words by others with the same number of letters in another language. As Harry Matthews writes in "Translation and the Oulipo," "These strange dislocations of the original may seem cavalier, but they are useful in drawing attention precisely to elements of language that normally pass us by, concerned as we naturally are with making sense of what we read. Nominal sense becomes implicitly no more than a part of overall meaning." Anyone who has read poetry in translation will not be surprised by the idea that one translates the form and the nominal sense of a text. The Oulipo translates only the form, and the Oulipo-esque permutations of TULOB translate the form of the original translation.

the bearable whiteness of being gay

the exquisite lightness of being

the incredible brace-ness of being

the incredible duck-ness of being

the incredible enough-ness of being (bumped)

the incredible lighted-ness of being in St. Paul

the incredible lightness of being (a bride!)

the incredible lightness of being in Australia

the incredible lightness of blogging

the incredible lightness of deepness

the incredible lightness of feeding

the incredible lightness of play

the incredible like-ness of being

the incredible Pollyanna-ness of being

the incredible tan-ness of being

the incredible white-ness of being

the new lightness of being

the unbearable brightness of busing

the unbearable brightness of golden dazzling

the unbearable brightness of neon

the unbearable brightness of wallpaper

the unbearable burden of Alice Walker

the unbearable burden of always being right

the unbearable burden of being a barnstormer

the unbearable burden of being a lawyer

the unbearable burden of being a woman

the unbearable burden of being important

the unbearable burden of being millenial

the unbearable burden of being right

the unbearable burden of crappy sequels

The most far-reaching effect of the translated title is not a widespread knowledge of Czech literature. Far from it: how many of those who play on the title could name the original author? Rather than the transmission of authorship or a certain content, the repetition of the form is itself the achievement. Rather than readers, the translation has created, in the first place, a bevy of translators working from one English version to another. Heim's translation saturates the English language with translations of translations of translations.

the unbearable burden of kindness

the unbearable burden of lightness

the unbearable burden of niceness

the unbearable burden of raising a child with Down Syndrome

the unbearable burden of reasonableness.

the unbearable burden of true genius

the unbearable burden of uniqueness

the unbearable burden of walking

the unbearable heaviness of "Borges words"

the unbearable heaviness of (not) blogging

the unbearable heaviness of a new poll

the unbearable heaviness of acting

the unbearable heaviness of baking cake

the unbearable heaviness of breathing in Thailand

the unbearable heaviness of business class

the unbearable heaviness of change

the unbearable heaviness of chronic disease

the unbearable heaviness of colloids

the unbearable heaviness of cookbooks

the unbearable heaviness of debt

the unbearable heaviness of feeling

the unbearable heaviness of forgiveness

the unbearable heaviness of governing

the unbearable heaviness of government debt

the unbearable heaviness of grief

the unbearable heaviness of having

the unbearable heaviness of industry

the unbearable heaviness of java strings

the unbearable heaviness of Jewish power

the unbearable heaviness of Jewish self-hatred

the unbearable heaviness of knowing

the unbearable heaviness of philosophy

the unbearable heaviness of psychiatric drug withdrawal

the unbearable heaviness of remembering

the unbearable heaviness of soul

the unbearable heaviness of spuds

the unbearable heaviness of stuff

the unbearable heaviness of the pension protection act

the unbearable heaviness of the tripod

the unbearable heaviness of truthtelling

the unbearable heaviness of voting in Texas

the unbearable heaviness of words

the unbearable hotness of being

the unbearable hotness of chefs

the unbearable hotness of drewt90

the unbearable hotness of Elyse

the unbearable hotness of Heather

the unbearable hotness of heating

the unbearable hotness of high density storage

the unbearable hotness of L. A.

the unbearable hotness of Levi

the unbearable hotness of neandertals

the unbearable hotness of Ricci

the unbearable hotness of Skarsgard

the unbearable lightness of being no one

the unbearable lightness of being portrayed

the unbearable lightness of debating

the unbearable lightness of being the proletariat

the unbearable mightiness of deflation

the unbearable politeness of being

the unbearable politeness of being at Lambeth conference

the unbearable politeness of being Indian

the unbearable politeness of certain beings

the unbearable politeness of human beings

the unbearable politeness of media

the unbearable politeness of poetry readings

the unbearable rightness of archives

the unbearable rightness of bedside rationing

the unbearable rightness of being a Stanford fan

the unbearable rightness of being Mumbai

the unbearable rightness of contrariness

the unbearable rightness of criticism

the unbearable rightness of diversity

the unbearable rightness of editing

the unbearable rightness of fiction

the unbearable rightness of fleeing

the unbearable rightness of penny

the unbearable rightness of pushing buttons

the unbearable rightness of questioning

the unbearable rightness of seeing

the unbearable rightness of voters

the unbearable 'rightness' of whiteness

the unbearable slightness of being

the unbearable slightness of being foreign

the unbearable slightness of being indie

the unbearable slightness of Jackass

the unbearable slightness of latter-day French cinema

the unbearable slightness of partitions

the unbearable slightness of polling

the unbearable slightness of seeing

the unbearable slightness of the architectural form

the unbearable tightness of being

the unbearable tightness of being (a superhero)

the unbearable tightness of being me

the unbearable tightness of chingy

the unbearable tightness of lending

the unbearable tightness of money

the unbearable tightness of service

the unbearable tightness of the unbearble lightness of being

the unbearable triteness of (not) being (at AWP or the Superbowl)

the unbearable triteness of being

the unbearable triteness of being (an unpaid intern)

the unbearable triteness of being a tv critic

the unbearable triteness of being fashionable

the unbearable triteness of best-selling BS

the unbearable triteness of blogging

the unbearable triteness of cheating

the unbearable triteness of facebook

the unbearable triteness of hating

the unbearable triteness of leaving

the unbearable triteness of no bank holiday

the unbearable triteness of preening

the unbearable triteness of sucking

the unbearable triteness of vlogging

the unbearable triteness of whiteness

the unbearable agony of being

the unbearable being of light

the unbearable b-ness of software

the unbearable brightness of being right

the unbearable brown-ness of Raj Rajaratnam

the unbearable burden of intellectual indebtedness

the unbearable burden of being in the same boat

the unbearable chunkiness of being

the unbearable complexity of being me

the unbearable dullness of being successful

the unbearable embeddedness of being

the unbearable hotness of being Raghuram Rajan

the unbearable laxity of being

the unbearable lightness of being (a neutrino)

the unbearable lightness of being away

the unbearable lightness of being fake

the unbearable lightness of being intercultural

the unbearable lightness of being vegan

the unbearable liteness of being teen

the unbearable loudness of chewing

the unbearable meta of glee

the unbearable obnoxiousness of “being”

the unbearable paranoia of being South African

the unbearable pettiness of being rich

the unbearable pleasure of being a woman

the unbearable plight of wireless-less-ness

the unbearable rightness of being alive in Leitrim

the unbearable sadness of being Korean

the unbearable schizophrenia of being the PN

the unbearable shame of being an unblogger

the unbearable Sheitness of being

the unbearable lightness of regulatory costs

the unbearable sweetness of yoga

the unbearable thinness of being a model

the unbearable wholeness of beings

the unbearable wrongness of being

From Esther Allen, Sean Cotter, and Russell Valentino, eds., The Man Between: The Life and Legacy of Michael Heim, Translator, forthcoming October 2014 from Open Letter Books.