"I'm reading Brod's biography of Kafka....I'm delighted by each new thing I learn about Kafka because of how precisely it corresponds to what I have assumed and imagined to be true. I've always harbored a feeling...that I somehow understand Kafka better than others, not because I can claim a deeper intellectual insight into his work, but because of an intensely personal and existential understanding of experience that borders on spiritual kinship."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
There is a scene in the movie Invictus where Rugby captain Pienaar wonders (thinking about Nelson Mandela) what kind of man "could spend thirty years in a tiny cell, and come out ready to forgive the people who put [him] there?" I have my own wonder about Havel. Out of the debris of communism after the Prague Spring, with only Heidegger, Camus, Kafka, the theater of the absurd (Ionesco and Becket of all people) and a little Frank Zappa to inspire him, how does he emerge as a major moral and spiritual force within East Europe's dissident movement? A champion of meaning in a world where so many believed it had ceased to exist?
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