still rereading The Unbearable Lightness of Being...

... as I am still rereading Shikasta, in bits when I feel like it, until suddenly  I get a momentum so that I keep going. What struck me today in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as I read in the late morning having come in from the town and a bitter wind, enough to get me up again and in front of the screen to start writing, was this:

"Here he was doing things he didn't give a damn about, and enjoying it"

This is by comparison to his previous profession as a surgeon ( the post 1968 Soviet backed authorities have forced him to resign because he will not sign a retraction of a letter critical of the Soviets) when:

"Whenever anything went wrong on the operating table, he would be despondent and unable to sleep"

Tomas is just doing stuff (window-cleaning) , without weighty responsibility, but with a nice weighty hangover of respect from his previous occupation, and from his refusal to retract.  It reminds me of having a migraine when I was working, not in the times when I grimly hung on and worked through it, but when I was able to go home and climb into bed between cool sheets and lie down with nothing but thudding pain to occupy my mind, as the nausea used to fade as soon as I was able to lie down.  I would be able to perch just on the edge of sleep with the pain carefully balanced, as it felt, at the edge of my forehead, pushed out from consciousness although still a presence. That effort meant that I couldn't think about anything else - or the pain would trample its way back in - and in its own way it was a delightful precipice to lie on, it felt white, soft and above all, safe.