Peck - Crisis and Community

Here, however, is the passage I was looking for when I picked up Peck again

"Genuine communities of a sort frequently develop in response to crisis.  Strangers in the waiting room of an intensive-care ward suddenly come to share each other's hopes and fears and joys and griefs as their loved ones lie across the hall on the 'critical list.'"

"On a larger scale, in the course of a minute a distant earthquake causes buildings to crumble and crush thousands of people to death in Mexico City.  Suddenly rich and poor alike are working together night and day to rescue the injured and care for the homeless.  Meanwhile men and women of all nations open their pocketbooks and their hearts to a people they have never seen, much less met, in a sudden consciousness of our common humanity."

"The problem is that once the crisis is over, so - virtually always - is the community.  The collective spirit goes out of the people as they return to their ordinary individual lives, and community is lost.  yet community is so beautiful that the time of crisis is often mourned.  Many Russians speak with great feeling about the brutal days of the siege of Leningrad, when they all pulled together.  American veterans still remember the muddy foxholes of World War II, when they had a depth of comradeship and meaning in their lives they have never since been able to quite recapture"

"The most successful community in this nation - probably the whole world - is Alcoholics Anonymous, the 'Fellowship of AA'....As with the victims of a natural disaster, AA starts with people in crisis.  Men and women come to it in a moment of breaking."

M. Scott Peck - Politics again (sorry)

Havel's description of the sense of community that arose in connection with the trial of the Plastic People of the Universe (who can explain rock band names?) put in mind of another author I haven't picked up for quite some time - M. Scott Peck (specifically A Different Drum, his book on the phenomenon of community).  Haven't yet had time to pursue it in any depth, but I DID run onto a quote the resonated with Capek's staking out the radical center-

"When people ask me to define myself politically, I tell them that I am a radical conservative.  Unless it is Thursday, when I say I am a radical moderate.  The word "radical" comes from the latin radix, meaning root--the same word from which we get "radish."  The proper radical is one who tries to get to the root of things, not to be distracted by superficials, to see the woods for the trees.  It is good to be a radical.  Anyone who thinks deeply will be one.  In the dictionary the closest synonym to "radical" is "fundamentalist."  Which only makes sense.  Someone who gets down to the root of things is someone who gets down to fundamentals.  Yet in our North American culture these words have come to have opposite meanings, as if a radical were necessarily some left-wing, bomb-throwing anarchist and fundamentalist automatically some right-wing primitive thinker."

Havel - Community

The feelings that arose in Havel at the trial of a rock band were shared by a group of other dissidents who gathered to support the accused.

"Only the exalting awareness of an important, shared experience, and only the urgency of the challenge that everyone felt in it, could have explained the rapid genesis of that very special, improvised community that came into being here for the duration of the trial, and which was definitely something more than an accidental assembly of friends of the accused and people who were interested in the trial.  For instance, a new and quite unusual etiquette appeared: no one bothered with introductions, getting acquainted or feeling one another out.  The usual conventions were dropped and the usual reticence disappeared, and this happened right before the eyes of several squads of those 'others' (though they wore no uniforms, they were identifiable at once).  Dozens of things were discussed that many of us, in other circumstances, might have been afraid to talk about even with one other person.  It was a community of people who were not only more considerate, communicative, and trusting toward each other, they were in as strange way democratic.  A distinguished elderly gentleman, a former member of the praesidium of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, spoke with long-haired youths he'd never seen in his life before, and they spoke uninhibitedly with him, though they had known him only from photographs.  In this situation, all reserve and inner reticence seemed to lose its point; in this atmosphere, all the inevitable 'buts' seemed ridiculous, insignificant, and evasive.  Everyone seemed to feel that at a time when all the chips are down, there are only two things one can do: gamble everything or throw in the cards."

Serpentum in sinu foves

"You are nourishing a serpent in your bosom"

A proverb that refers to a fable of Aesop's.  As one who has nursed more than one serpent in his bosom with the mistaken belief it would not bite me, it's a useful reminder.

Havel - the challenge of an example

Havel finds a new energy in the quiet dignity, courage and solidarity of the defendants in the trial -

"Somewhere deep down, however, I discerned yet another element in this experience, perhaps the most important of all.  It was something that aroused me, a challenge that was all the more urgent for being unintentional.  It was the challenge of example.  Suddenly, much of the wariness and caution that marks my behavior seemed petty to me.  I felt an increased revulsion towards all forms of guile, all attempts at painlessly worming one's way out of vital dilemmas.  Suddenly, I discovered in myself more determination in one direction, and more independence in another.  Suddenly, I felt disgusted with a whole world, in which - as I realized then - I still have one foot: the world of emergency exits."

Havel - Turning Points

In a short samizdat essay from 1977 (The Trial), Havel talks about one of the turning points of the Czech dissident movement, the arrest and trial of an underground rock band from Prague.

"It doesn't often happen and when it does it usually happens when least expected: somewhere, something slips out of joint and suddenly a particular event, because of an unforeseen interplay between its inner premises and more or less fortuitous external circumstances, crosses the threshold of it usual place in the everyday world, breaks through the shell of what it is supposed to be and what it seems, and reveals its innermost symbolic significance.  And something originally quite ordinary suddenly casts a surprising light on the time and the world we live in, and dramatically highlights the fundamental questions."

"....if a certain event slips out of joint - and if it does in the deeper sense that I have in mind here - then inevitably something slips out of joint in ourselves, too: a new view of the world gives us a new view of our own human potential, of what we are and might be.  Abruptly jerked out of our 'routine humanness,' we stand once more face to face with the most important question of all:  How do we settle accounts with ourselves."

Capek on Idleness

Witty and urbane, Capek sings the praises of idleness.  But wait...
As is sometimes the case with this man, there is more going on beneath the seemingly simple surface of these waters.  He's not being funny at all, he's trying to describe an odd state of mind he finds attractive from time to time.  A state of mind that's easiest to describe by negations -

"...idleness is neither relaxation nor amusement.  Idleness, pure perfect idleness, is neither a pastime nor time's extension; idleness is something negative: it is the absence of everything by which a person is occupied, diverted, distracted, interested, employed, annoyed, pleased, attracted, involved, entertained, bored, enchanted, fatigued, absorbed or confused; it is nothing, a negation, an intentlessness, a lack-purpose, I don't really know how to put it: in short, something perfect and rare."

It almost sounds a bit like the practice of "sitting Zen" doesn't it?

"Relaxation is a slow, ever-flowing current which gently laps and cradles you; resting is a dark, calm pool in which the angry foam and sediment of evil or intense moments are drifting away; laziness is an inlet covered with green algae, slime and frog's eggs; but idleness is a standing-still.  I has neither rhythm nor sound; it is fixed, it does not progress...Water-lifeless and transparent."

This meditation of sorts, though seemingly nothing, is not without effect:

"And when a person is through idling, he arises and returns as if from another world.  Everything is a little alien and different"

Capek on Masaryk

In his essay "At the Crossroads of Europe" Capek gives a warm appraisal of his friend "T. G. Masaryk, the Liberator and first President of our Republic."

"For him, who for eighteen years and to such a ripe old age guided our State, politics represented a realization of love of our fellow men; in his eyes democracy and liberty were based on respect for man, for every man; they issued from recognition of his immortal soul and the infinite value of human life; for Masaryk the ultimate goal of all honest politics and all true statesmanship was to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth."

 It is interesting to think of the times when a figure like Masaryk can actually be effective in political life in our world.  I don't think they occur very often.  We (as mortals) are particularly open to them at the inception of what we might term the founding epoch of a national cycle.  The optimism and enthusiasm of new freedoms and opportunities create a place where a Masaryk, a Gandhi, a Mandela, or a Havel, can actually have a substantial political impact as well as a spiritual influence. 

Capek - Anticipation

Just a charming little passage about something that in our 21st century has almost passed away - the experience of waiting for the mail.

"No one these days gets out of bed believing that today, perhaps, he will accomplish something undreamed-of and surprising; and yet at the bottom of his heart he trembles incessantly in the expectation that today something unpredictable and grand will happen, that something will come from somewhere....

"And most curious of all is that this state of eternal expectation overcomes even people who on the whole don't have anything to wait for; they don't have an uncle in America, they don't long for something from somewhere that would intervene in their lives, and they would be terrified if they had to accept  a new assignment of some kind; and yet, at the postman's ring, they are seized with a glimmer of anxiety or hope that perhaps...who knows...something has come from somewhere in this large, strange world...God be praised, it's only some printed matter, an ad for coal by the truckload or in bags; but the eternal human hope that something unforeseen and wonderful will happen never definitively and irrevocably fails."

Havel on Political Parties

From an interview in 1987,

"I've come to be rather skeptical about the very principle of mass political parties.  I suspect that involvement in government inevitably leads to parties' bureaucratization, corruption, and loss of democracy.  I'm not opposed to solidarity and cohesion of various interest groups of like minded people.  It's just that I'm against anything that serves to cloud personal responsibility, or rewards anyone with privileges for devotion to a particular power-oriented group."