Letter from Vaclav Havel to his Wife Olga, from Prison
October 3, 1981
Dear Olga,
In recent years I’ve met several intelligent and decent people who were very clearly and to my mind, very tragically, marked by their fate: they became bitter, misanthropic world-haters who lost faith in everything. Quite separately, they managed to persuade themselves that people are selfish, evil and untrustworthy, that it makes no sense to help anyone, to try to achieve anything or rectify anything, that all moral principles, higher aims and suprapersonal ideals are naively utopian and that one must accept the world “as it is” – which is to say unalterably bad – and behave accordingly. And that means looking out for no one but oneself and living the rest of one’s life as quietly and inconspicuously as possible.
In certain extreme circumstances it is by no means difficult to succumb to this philosophy of life. Nevertheless I think that giving up on life – and this philosophy is an expression of that attitude – is one of the saddest forms of human downfall. Because it is a descent into regions where life really does lose its meaning.
Indeed, it is not the authors of absurd plays or pessimistic poems, nor the suicides, nor people constantly afflicted by anger, boredom, anxiety and despair, nor the alcoholics and drug addicts, who have, in the deepest sense, lost their grip on the meaning of life and become “nonbelievers”: it is people who are apathetic. (By the way, in the last couple of years I’ve met a lot of eccentrics, miserable and desperate men, adventurers, perverts, Pollyannas and of course a wide assortment of greater and lesser scoundrels, but not many who are apathetic in the sense I mean. Such men do not remain for long in places like this. Still, some here are making a successful bid to join those ranks – men with a more intellectual bent, or who are “decent men who have tripped up.”)
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