The Unknown Heart

"For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least be selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown - known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors false suppositions."


George Eliot
Middlemarch

The pleasure of a new acquaintance

"One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man."

George Eliot
Middlemarch

Havel's Musings on the Phenomenological Structure of the Universe - 4

"The fourth and final order....is nothing more and nothing less than the real order of things, of human things above all, the reality around us, its rules, customs, circumstances, relationships - just as they are, which means full of variety, contradictions, complexities, with everything that is good and bad, pretty and ugly, meaningful and absurd.  It is simply the 'mishmash of everything' that we call life.  It includes not only the sphere of established practices, customs, conventions, prejudices and habits, etc., but also the sphere of natural and healthy demands and reasonable expectations.  It is a certain system of activity into which one may enter responsibly or irresponsibly, to fulfill the best in oneself or to realize the worst; to change that order for the better or to develop everything in it that is base, distorted and alienating.  But regardless of how he does it or of the quality of his intentions, man may enter and find a place in this order easily, authentically, spontaneously and with supreme confidence, or on the contrary, he may find his efforts from start to finish accompanied by degrees of uncertainty, doubts or a gnawing sensation of his own strangeness."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel's Musings on the Phenomenological Structure of the Universe - 3

"Over and against this passionate order, which is the work of people created 'in God's image,' there constantly recurs its evil caricature and misshapen protagonist, 'the bastard son of Being,' the offspring of indifference to the meaning of Being and vindictive fear of its mystery: the chilling work of man as 'the image of the devil': the order of homogenization by violence, perfectly organized impotence and centrally directed desolation and boredom, in which man is conceived as a cybernetic unit without free will, without the power to reason for himself, without a unique life of his own, and where that monstrous idea, order, is a euphemism for the graveyard.  (I refer you to Fromm's excellent analysis of fascism.)

Thus against 'the order of life,' sustained by a longing for meaning and an experience of the mystery of Being, there stands this 'order of death,' a monument to non-sense, an executioner of mystery, a materialization of nothingness."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel's Musings on the Phenomenological Structure of the Universe - 2

"Alongside the general miracle of being - both as a part of that miracle and as its protagonist, as a special reiteration of it and rebellious attempt to know, understand, control and transcend it - stands the miracle of the human spirit, of human existence.  Into the infinite silence of the omnipresent order of Being, then there sounds the impassioned voice of the order of human freedom, of life, of spirit.  The subtly structured world of meaningful and hopeful human life, opening new vistas of freedom and carrying man to a deeper experience of Being, the countless remarkable intellectual (mystical, religious, scientific) and moral system, that special way in which the order of Being both re-creates and, at the same time, lends its own meaning to mythology (in earlier times) and artistic creation (today, i.e., in the historical period), in short the way in which man becomes man in the finest sense of the word - all of this constitutes the 'order of life,' 'the order of the spirit,' 'the order of human work.'  Together, it all constitutes an objectivized expression of that 'second creation of the world,' which is human existence.

I would say that this 'order of life' is a kind of 'legitimate son,' of the order of Being,' because it grows out of an indestructible faith in the latter's meaning and a fearless confrontation with its mystery."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel's Musings on the Phenomenological Structure of the Universe - 1

"Behind all phenomena and discrete entities in the world, we may observe, intimate or experience existentially in various ways something like a general 'order of being.'  The essence and meaning of this order are veiled in mystery; it is as much an enigma as the Sphinx, it always speaks to us differently and always, I suppose, in ways that we ourselves are open to, in ways, to put it simple, that we can hear."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

The Work Itself

"The work itself, the pleasure of finding a field for my peculiar powers, is my highest reward."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sign of the Four