The Marginalian

“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me,” Oscar Wilde wrote from prison. “There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.”

The cruel kindness of life is that our sturdiest fulcrum of transformation is the devastation of our hopes and wishes — the losses, the heartbreaks, the diagnoses that shatter the template of the self, leaving us to reconstitute a new way of being from the rubble. In those moments, brutal and inevitable, we come to realize that no prayer or protest will bend reality to our will, that we are being bent to it instead and we have two options only: bow or break. Suffering, surrender, transformation — this may be the simplest formulation of the life process. It is the evolutionary mechanism of adaptation by which every creature on Earth became what it is. It is existential mechanism by which we become who we are. In a universe where free will may well be an illusion, what we make of our suffering may be the measure and meaning of our freedom. “Everything can be taken from a man,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his epochal memoir of surviving the unsurvivable, “but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Just before dawn on May 29, 1979, the Czechoslovakian State Security Police barged into the home of the playwright, essayist, and poet Václav Havel (October 5, 1936–December 18, 2011), dragged him out of bed, and threw him in a municipal jail along with ten other members of the Committee to Defend the Unjustly Prosecuted — a human rights movement formed to bring to light cases of people harassed and imprisoned for speaking up against the dictatorship.

Havel was not surprised. A decade earlier, he had discovered a listening device in the ceiling of his Prague apartment. He had been trailed by the secret police ever since. He had watched his books removed from schools and public libraries, his plays banned from the stage.

“It’s Tuesday evening and I’ve just returned from court a sentenced man,” he wrote to his wife Olga when he was found guilty on charges of “subversion” a month after his forty-third birthday. “I’m taking my sentence, as they say, philosophically.” The philosophy he drew from the experience would lead him to write the finest thing I have ever read about the meaning of hope.

Havel was sent to a prison ruled by a sadistic admirer of Hitler who in his heyday had presided over a Stalinist prison camp. Now, all the more embittered by the knowledge that he was nearing the end of his career, the warden spent his days tormenting his captives in body and in mind. The prisoners, whose days were filled with hard labor, were allowed to write to just one person, a single four-page letter a week. Havel chose Olga — “a working-class girl, very much her own person, sober, unsentimental,” who had always been the first reader of all his work and his “main authority when it comes to judging it.” Looking back on his life, he would recall: “I needed an energetic woman beside me to turn to for advice and yet still be someone I could be in awe of.”

The letters had to be legible, with nothing corrected or crossed out. Quotation marks, foreign expressions, underlining, and humor were forbidden. Those deemed to contain too many “thoughts” were confiscated. Once, Havel was thrown into solitary confinement after it was discovered that he had been writing on behalf of an illiterate Roma man, just as Whitman had done for illiterate Civil War soldiers an epoch ago and a world away.

Still, as if to remind us that constraint is a catalyst of creativity, Havel managed to contraband a wealth of “thoughts” in these spare dispatches to his wife. They survive as Letters to Olga (public library) — the extraordinary record of the philosophy he drew from his plight, out of which arises a lucid and luminous field guide to suffering as an instrument of self-refinement, an ode to the refusal of having one’s spirit broken by any depredation of the body or the mind, and a stubborn insistence on kindness as the only lifeline amid cruelty.

Days after his sentence, with an eye to the five years ahead — an unimaginable time horizon of freedom — Havel outlines his spiritual strategy for survival:

I find myself in a radically new existential situation, and the first thing I have to do is learn to live with it, which means finding a completely new structure of values and a new perspective on everything — other hopes, other aims, other interests, other joys. I have to create a new concept of time for myself and ultimately a new concept of life.

But, in consonance with the visionary Elizabeth Peabody’s admonition that the greatest danger to the gifted is middle age, “when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth,” Havel realizes that this new concept is in fact a return to a prior purity occluded by the self we ossify into when we begin believing our own myth, which may be the greatest danger to the artist. (The recovery of that deeper purity is what Hermann Hesse meant when he contemplated discovering the soul beneath the self.) Suddenly horrified by the way we have of caving in on ourselves by becoming our own favorite subject, Havel tells Olga:

Learning to live with this new situation and one of the tasks I’ve set myself during this long stay in prison will be a kind of “self-consolidation.” When I began to write plays, I wasn’t as inwardly burdened as I have been in recent years; I had… far more equanimity; I saw most things in proportion; I had a balanced outlook and a sense of humor, without a trace of uptightness, hysteria, bitterness. The positions I took were not absolute; I wasn’t constantly brooding over myself, absorbed in my own feelings, etc. — and at the same time I possessed a kind of harmonious inner certitude. Obsessive critical introspection is the other side of “pigheadedness.”

With an eye to the fault lines that often become frontiers of growth, he adds:

Jail, of all places, may seem to you a strange instrument of this self-reconstitution, but I truly feel that when I’m cut off from all my former commitments for so long, I might somehow achieve inner freedom and a new mastery over myself. I don’t intend to revise my view of the world, of course, but rather to find a better way of fulfilling the demands that the world — as I see it — places on me. I don’t want to change myself, but to be myself in a better way… It also seems to me that the only way for someone like me to survive here is to breathe his own meaning into the experience.

Prison calibrated his metric for what constitutes a good or bad day. A hot bath, a healthy meal, and “a marvelous session of yoga” left him gladdened to the bone. Of the bad days he could say little — no record survives of the abuses he endured — other than reporting on the “sheer agony” of his hemorrhoids. (“It’s worse here than it would be outside… You’re alone with your pain and you have to go through with it.”) He decided that, “theoretically,” nothing could stop him from writing a new play while in prison. (He did.) He decided that, practically, he could use the time to improve his English and learn German. In one of his provision lists to Olga, in between a hard case for his glasses, a pocket calendar, warm socks, and “a lot of vitamins,” he requested the German-Czech dictionary from their home and a language textbook. And then he itemized his resolutions for serving his sentence:

1. to remain at least as healthy as I am now (and perhaps cure my hemorrhoids);
2. generally reconstitute myself psychologically;
3. write at least two play;
4. improve my English;
5. learn German at least as well as I know English;
6. study the entire Bible thoroughly.

Three years into his imprisonment, the state police visited Havel and told him he could be home within the week if only he would write a single sentence renouncing his views and asking for pardon. Unlike Galileo, he refused. Four months later, Havel fell ill with a fever so high that he feared he would not live. So did the wardens, who threw him in the back of a police van and drove him fifty miles to a prison hospital in Prague as he shivered with the delirium of death handcuffed in his pajamas.

When he slowly returned to the land of the living, Havel gambled that the hospital censors might be less severe than the prison’s and composed the first detailed letter to Olga describing his struggle. It made it. An epoch before social media, she immediately reached out to his friends aboard. Petitions on his behalf began pouring in from all over the world through this borderless network of solidarity.

One evening after he was sent back to prison, as he was about to go to sleep, several guards suddenly barged into his cell, along with a doctor and “a woman official of some kind.” They informed Havel that his sentence was terminated. He was so astonished that, in a literal embodiment of Dorris Lessing’s metaphor of the prisons we choose to live inside, he asked to spend one more night in his cell. They refused — he was now a civilian. He was taken out in his pajamas.

When Havel reentered the real world, he devoted himself to eradicating the tyrannical impulse that makes dictatorships and their systemic attack on the dignity of human beings possible. Six years after his release from prison, he was unanimously elected president of Czechoslovakia by the Federal Assembly. The following year, when the country held its first free election in nearly half a century, the was re-elected by the people. As tensions between Czechs and Slovaks rose in the 1990s, he governed a divided nation by the personal credo he had articulated in one of his prison letters to Olga — a sentiment as true of physical imprisonment as of the prisons of the mind we enter whenever we succumb to divisive ideologies or take a victim stance toward our suffering:

I’ve discovered that in lengthy prison terms, sensitive people are in danger of becoming embittered, developing grudges against the world, growing dull, indifferent and selfish. One of my main aims is not to yield an inch to such threats, regardless of how long I’m here. I want to remain open to the world, not to shut myself up against it; I want to retain my interest in other people and my love for them. I have different opinions of different people, but I cannot say that I hate anyone in the world. I have no intention of changing in that regard. If I did, it would mean I had lost.