The cosmopolitan ecologist

I just finished Vaclav Havel’s memoir, To the Castle and Back, and the harsh feelings I had towards the book as I began it dissipated a bit by the end. It has an odd structure, equal parts an interview done concerning events before he was president, memos he wrote while he was president, and recollections he wrote some years after he left office, all interspersed randomly among each other, with occasional repetitions of texts. As a biography, it’s a failure. By the end of the book, I still know little of the history of the Czech Republic, or what Havel did while in office. Readers looking for that should go to Havel’s book, Disturbing the Peace. That book remains one of the most influential books I’ve ever read, and I still count myself as lucky for stumbling on it in a friend’s bookshelf.

As a piece of literature, though, To the Castle is a success. Fundamentally, it casts Havel (and all writers and activists) as a sort of postmodern Sisyphus. He writes in depth and at length about his difficulty getting motivated and starting to write. He write, to the point of being whiney, about his intense doubt that his writing and political projects will ever achieve their high objectives. Indeed, he seems to argue that writing is fundamentally futile: “man will carry the complete truth about himself to the grave.” And yet Havel write, driven on by the “somewhat ridiculous” idea that “the world desperately needs the work in question, and will fall apart if it doesn’t appear.” I too like writing and thinking yet have intense self-doubt, and so I get great joy seeing that someone way more gifted than I like Havel suffers the same. I agree with Havel’s quote: “I sometimes ask myself whether I did not originally begin to write… only to overcome my essential experience of inappropriateness… in order to be able to live with those feelings.”

Yet somehow the Sisyphean task of the writer gives him meaning: “He simply tried to capture the world and himself more and more exactly through words, images, or actors, and the more he succeeds, the more aware he is that he can never completely capture either the world or himself… but that drives him to keep trying.” Imagine Sisyphus as conscious of the absurdity of his task, yet still drawing meaning from it. Camus would be proud.

This book is also a lament, for it is perhaps his last, and is certainly written as such. Havel is sending a message: he did his best to write himself into the world, but ultimately failed to communicate his internal self. Like a mortal Sisyphus in old age realizing he will never reach the top of this hill, nor could have.