Lightness/weight.

I've started reading a book by Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, under Caroline's recommendation. She described it vaguely as a philosophy book, and told me that it was originally written in Czech, so the style of writing is really quite beautiful and different. She read me a few quotes from it that she had written in a notebook of hers, and I was intrigued so I decided to take her up on it.
Now just over 50 pages in, I can see why it was such a difficult novel to describe. There are two main characters in the book so far: a womanizer named Tomas and his wife Tereza. (Tomas also has a mistress named Sabina - one of many.) Not very much 'happens' in the book, but the author delves deeply into the significance of the things that do. The question that the author seeks to answer in this work is described as such:

"If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. 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 the 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.
"Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
"Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/nonbeing. One half of the opposite he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?
"Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative.
"Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all."

So I hope that helps to set the tone for this novel. As people I think we're all somewhere in the middle of the scale between wanting to be carefree and weightless, but also wanting to make a difference in the world and have some pull in our respective situations. For us to assign a label such as positive or negative to either side seems a daunting task.
For the record, I believe weight to be the positive pole.