Interesting carry on, kat, from my earlier remarks on "The Sixth Sense" (if that is what it is, incorrigible narcissist that I am), but like most Kundera it is a gesture in the right direction without being really penetrating. If people who strive for higher things feel vertigo, it does not necessarily mean that they are being sucked down by the desire for emptiness, annihilation (Schopenhauer and most Eastern Europeans are big on this -- as if people in these situations have a death wish). It is often that one is trying to live in a place without handholds. It is like swaying upright on a high mountain. Especially if you are destroying previous categories and creating your own (as an artist does) there is this sense that you are being held up by nothing, or a terrible fear that if you destroy this last handhold, there will be nothing. I suffer from vertigo, and used to think that it was about trying to keep some dark part of oneself from committing suicide by hurling oneself over the edge. I always believed it was about the horrifying replay of having one's body smashed at the bottom of wherever. But having once sat on the edge of a mountain cliff in Italy determined to look at this fear close up (it didn't cure me, but it was an interesting half hour), now I think it is not about the fear of hitting the bottom, or the fear of falling; it is about not being able to hold on to anything as one falls. That there is no handhold, really; or if there is one, it is what you have to find after you go through the realm of "no handhold" (all very Zen). This is why the vertigo of everyday life is the same: it isn't a death wish at all -- if anything, it is a fear of seeing real life as it is. Maybe that is just my version of vertigo.
yours, Peter T.