Vaclav Havel & a Politics of Doubt

I’ve been away and then laid low by some bug, so am late to writing anything about the sad news of Vaclav Havel’s death. Pete has already noted his 1990 New Year speech, but I’d also recommend reading David Remnick’s profile of Havel, published by the New Yorker in 2003. There’s plenty of good stuff there, including this:

Havel allowed that he felt “strangely paralyzed, empty inside,” fearful that dissent and governing were hardly the same. “At the very deepest core of this feeling there was, ultimately, a sensation of the absurd: what Sisyphus might have felt if one fine day his boulder stopped, rested on the hilltop, and failed to roll back down,” he told an audience in Salzburg. “It was the sensation of a Sisyphus mentally unprepared for the possibility that his efforts might succeed, a Sisyphus whose life had lost its old purpose and hadn’t yet developed a new one.”

[…] A familiar Prague voice, the voice of Kafka, told him what anyone who has grown up in a police state knows instinctually—that it could all end as easily as it started.

“I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if, in the very middle of my Presidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to a quarry to break rocks,” he told a startled audience at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, less than six months after taking office.