I recently finished devouring
Disturbing the Peace, a book that is really an extended interview with
Vaclav Havel. If you don't know who Havel is, read the wikipedia link that goes with his name, or else you will never believe how incredible he really is. An artist turned president is slightly uncommon in any age, yet that is exactly who we are talking about. I first ran into him reading
The Truth about the Truth, but knew I needed more. Fortunately this book happened to make an appearance at the local Goodwill and I snatched it up. I've decided it is too brilliant to have me actually review it, and instead am going to share my favorite quotes. Do yourself a favor and read all of them:
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The period you grow up in and mature in always influences your thinking. This in itself requires no self-criticism. What is more important is how you have allowed yourself to be influenced, whether by good or by evil. (8)
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I’m a writer, and I’ve always understood y mission to be to speak the truth about the world I live in, to bear witness to its terrors and its miseries – in other words, to warn rather than hand out prescriptions for change. (8)
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I too feel that somewhere here there is a basic tension out of which the present global crisis has grown. At the same time, I’m persuaded that this conflict – and the increasingly hypertrophic impersonal power itself – is directly related to the spiritual condition of modern civilization. This condition is characterized by loss: the loss of metaphysical certainties, of an experience of the transcendental, of any superpersonal moral authority, and of any kind of higher horizon. It is strange but ultimately quite logical: as soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it
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We are going through a great departure from God which has no parallel in history. As far as I know, we are living in the middle of the first atheistic civilization… [M]odern man, who is convinced he can know everything and bring everything under his control, is somewhere in the background of the present crisis. It seems to me that if the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man.
Man must in some way come to his senses. He must extricate himself from this terrible involvement in both the obvious and the hidden mechanisms of totality, from consumption to repression, from advertising to manipulation through television. He must rebel against his role as a helpless cog in the gigantic and enormous machinery hurtling God knows where. He must discover again, within himself, a deeper sense of responsibility toward the world, which means responsibility toward something higher than himself. (10-11)
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The most important thing is that man should be the measure of all structures, including economic structures, and not that man be made to measure for those structures. The most important thing is not to lose sight of personal relationships – i.e., the relationships between man and his co-workers, between subordinates and their superiors, between man and his work, between this work and its consequences, and so on. (13)
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[Answering the question: What exactly is absurd theatre? How would you define it?]
[I]t demonstrates modern humanity in a “state of crisis,” as it were. That is, it shows man having lost his fundamental metaphysical certainty, the experience of the absolute, his relationship to eternity, the sensation of meaning – in other words, having lost the ground under his feet. This is a man for whom everything is coming apart, whose world is collapsing, who senses that he has irrevocably lost something but is unable to admit this to himself and therefore hides from it. (53)
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A play is bound, to a far greater extent, to the “here” and a “now.” It is always born out of a particular social and spiritual climate, and it is directed at that climate. (68)
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The abyss between life and the system grew deeper. (94)
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They [the bureaucrats] wanted reform, but only within the limits of their limited imaginations. (95)
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[S]ociety is a very mysterious animal with many hidden faces and hidden potentialities, and…it’s exremely short-sighted to believe that the face society happens to be presenting to you at a given moment is its only true face. None of us know the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events, both visible and invisible…one must be careful about coming to any conclusions about the way we are, or what can be expected of us. (109)
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[A] purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance. (115)
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Here [a series of unjust arrests] power had unintentionally revealed its own most proper intention: to make life entirely the same, to surgically remove from it everything that was even slightly different, everything that was highly individual, everything that stood out, that was independent and unclassifiable. (129)
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By the “self-momentum” of a power or a system I mean the blind, unconscious, irresponsible, uncontrollable, and unchecked momentum that is no longer the work of people, but which drags people along with it and therefore manipulates them. It’s obvious that this self-momentum is in fact the momentum of the impersonal power that Belohradsky talks about. (166)
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Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately exerienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons…Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as our do, here and now. (181-182)
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Every work of art points somewhere beyond itself; it transcends itself and its author; it creates a specific force field around itself that moves the human mind and the human nervous system in a way that its author could scarcely have planned ahead of time. (198)
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Our [playwrites] mission is to warn, to predict horrors, to see clearly what is evil. Face to face with a distillation of evil, man might well recognize what is good. By showing good on the stage, we ultimately rob him of the possibility of making such a recognition himself – as his own existential act. (199)
Peace,
Matt
