Gull Beckerman
Appearances
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 1)
Reading books at that age was tremendously important to me. It's hard to think of this outside of my own biography, which was as a kid who grew up in a house without books, an immigrant household whose parents, you know, didn't graduate from high school. So the books and the literary culture was not a big part of our surroundings and sort of what I grew up with.
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 1)
It didn't take me long to think through what book impacted me most in high school. Right away, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being came to mind, a choice that I'm a little bit embarrassed about, as I imagine a lot of people will be embarrassed about what affected them most at that impressionable age.
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 1)
But it was a book that meant a lot to me, and I had a kind of a Kundera moment where I read everything I could by him. which is sort of an exploration of a group of friends and lovers around the Prague Spring in 1968, is sort of, you know, it's wonderfully sort of romantic in the way that it engages with ideas. And for somebody who is 16, incredibly sort of thrilling to encounter those ideas.
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 1)
Mostly, you know, he's talking about existentialism. The title of the book, in a way, says it all. These are characters who are sort of dealing with what you could call sort of the paradox of freedom. On the one hand, they don't want to be pinned down. They don't want to be attached. They don't want to be weighed down by anything. They want to be free.
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 1)
But at the same time, there is a kind of unbearableness to that freedom of being able to be anything and anyone. And so they seek opportunities to be grounded, grounded by relationships, grounded by obligations.
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 1)
And this, I think, speaks to a teenager's mind, you know, as they're trying to figure out who they're going to be, you know, how much lightness and how much weight do they want in their lives. And I just remember the distillation of that philosophy of what is essentially, you know, Sartrean thought, right?
Radio Atlantic
The Books We Read in High School (Part 1)
into this very simple and evocative metaphor of lightness and weight really spoke to me when I was at that moment in my life where I wanted to kind of understand how I was going to shape my own identity through the choices that I made. My name is Gull Beckerman. I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic.