"At the same time, it is not important at all how, and to what extent, you think about your faith, or whether you are aware of it at all; the only thing that matters is how profoundly the assumption of meaning, or the longing for it, lies dormant in the very bowels of your relationship to the world and of all your actions. I mean both the meaning of individual entities and 'meaning altogether' (as the unique and ultimate source of the meaning of individual entities), meaning that transcends the relative limits of space, time or utilitarian (i.e. relativistic) human calculation. (For it is only in the light of the eternal, absolute 'memory of being,' that most of the good things one does can be explained.) And so, just as that meaning transcends the relative world whose meaning it constitutes, so faith in meaning transcends all relative utility, and is therefore independent of how things turn out: everything - even what turns out badly - has its own admittedly obscure meaning in relation to faith. Without this assumption of meaning or a longing for it, the experience of nonsense - absence of meaning - would be unthinkable. (That is the case with so-called absurd art which, more than anything else - because it is a desperate cry against the loss of meaning - contains faith; the only art which may be able to get along without faith is strictly commercial art.) In any case faith, with its profound assumption of meaning, has its natural antithesis in the experience of nothingness; they are interrelated and human life is in fact a constant struggle for our souls waged by these two powers. If nothingness wins out, dramatic tension vanishes, man surrenders to apathy, and faith and meaning exist only as a backdrop against which others become aware of his fall."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
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