{"id":10685,"date":"2025-05-13T16:17:02","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T20:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/vaclav-havel-on-how-to-live-with-your-greatest-failure-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-05-13T16:17:02","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T20:17:02","slug":"vaclav-havel-on-how-to-live-with-your-greatest-failure-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/vaclav-havel-on-how-to-live-with-your-greatest-failure-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"V\u00e1clav Havel on How to Live with Your Greatest Failure \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"V\u00e1clav<\/a><\/p>\n

Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the \u201cfail better\u201d of startup culture, not the \u201cfail forward\u201d of self-help, not the failure that is childhood\u2019s fulcrum of learning<\/a>, not the inspired mistakes that propel creative risk<\/a>, but simply that helpless and harrowing moment when you face the abyss between your will and your powers, your values and your choices, your ideal self and your real self. It is without redemption, such failure. But it need not be without reward. Admitting failure, especially moral failure, is hard enough \u2014 to others, where the temptation to displace blame and make excuses seduces most, but most of all to oneself. Accepting it is even harder \u2014 but it is on the other side of acceptance that the true reward of failure is to be found.<\/p>\n

That is what the great Czech playwright, essayist, and poet V\u00e1clav Havel<\/strong> (October 5, 1936\u2013December 18, 2011) explores in an extraordinary feat of soul-searching and reckoning with the human condition, found in his Letters to Olga<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), one of the most moving books I have ever read \u2014 the living record of his imprisonment after being found guilty on charges of \u201csubversion\u201d for his plays criticizing the communist regime and his human rights work defending the unjustly persecuted.<\/p>\n

\"\"
V\u00e1clav Havel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the summer of his forty-sixth year, Havel recounts a moment of moral failure that shaped the course of his life:<\/p>\n

\n

Dear Olga,<\/p>\n

Five years ago something happened tome that in many regards had a key significance in my subsequent life. It began rather inconspicuously: I was in detention for the firs time and one evening, after interrogation, I wrote out a request to the Public Prosecutor for my release. Prisoners in detention are always writing such requests, and I too treated it as something routine and unimportant, more in the nature of mental hygiene: I knew, of course, that my eventual release or nonrelease would be decided by factors having nothing to do with whether I wrote the appropriate request or not. Still, the interrogations weren\u2019t going anywhere and it seemed proper to use the opportunity to let myself be heard. I wrote my request in a way that at the time seemed extremely tactical and cunning: while saying nothing I did not believe or that wasn\u2019t true, I simply \u201coverlooked\u201d the fact that truth lies not only in what is said, but also in who says it, and to whom, why, how and under what circumstances it is expressed. Thanks to this minor \u201coversight\u201d (more precisely, this minor self-deception) what I said came dangerously close \u2014 by chance, as it were \u2014 to what the authorities wanted to hear. What was particularly absurd was the fact that my motive \u2014 at least my conscious and admitted motive \u2014 was not the hope that it would produce results, but merely a kind of professionally intellectualistic and somewhat perverse delight in my won \u2014 or so I thought \u2014 \u201chonorable cleverness.\u201d (I should add, to complete the picture, that when I read it some years later, the honor in that cleverness made my hair stand on end.) I sent the request off the following day and because no one responded to it and my detention was prolonged again, I assumed it had ended up where such requests usually end up, and I more or less forgot about it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Havel was shocked to be told one day that he was most likely going to be released and \u201cpolitical use\u201d would be made of his petition. He recounts: <\/p>\n

\n

Of course I knew right away what that meant: (1) that with appropriate \u201crecasting,\u201d \u201cadditions\u201d and widespread publicity, the impression would be created that I had not held out, that I had given in to pressure and backed down from my positions, opinions and all my previous work; in short, that I had betrayed my cause, all for a trivial reason \u2014 to get myself out of jail; (2) no denial or correction on my part would alter that impression because I had undeniably written something that \u201cmet them halfway\u201d and anything I could add would, quite rightly, seem like an attempt to worm my way out of it; (3) that the approaching catastrophe was unavoidable; (4) that the blot it would leave me on and everything I had taken part in would haunt me for years to come, that it would cause me measureless inner suffering, and that I would probably try to erase it with several years in prison (which in fact happened), but that not even that would rid me entirely of the stigma; (5) that I had no one but myself to blame: I was neither forced to do it, nor offered a bribe; I was not, in fact, in a dilemma and it was only because I\u2019d unforgivably let down my moral guard that I\u2019d given the other side \u2014 voluntarily and quite pointlessly \u2014 a weapon that amounted to a heaven-sent gift.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
One of Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s illustrations for the essays of Montaigne<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The haunting price of self-knowledge is that you always know, or some part of you always knows, exactly what your own moral failures would cost you. All Havel feared would happen is exactly what happened:<\/p>\n

\n

I came out of prison discredited, to confront a world that seemed to me one enormous, supremely justified rebuke. No one knows what I went through in that darkest period of my life\u2026 weeks, months, years in fact, of silent desperation, self-castigation, shame, inner humiliation, reproach and uncomprehending questioning. For a while I escaped from a world I felt too embarrassed to face into gloomy isolation, taking masochistic delight in endless orgies of self-blame. And then for a while I fled this inner hell into frantic activity through which I tried to drown out my anguish and at the same time, to \u201crehabilitate\u201d myself somehow.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Marianne Dubuc from The Lion and the Bird<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

His only relative reprieve came when he was thrown into prison again. But it took him years to fully accept his moral failure and wrest from it something larger, something the dream of blamelessness and the performance of perfection could ever secure for the life of the soul. In a testament to the indivisible yin-yang of fortune and misfortune illustrated by the ancient parable of the Chinese farmer<\/a>, he writes:<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019ve only now begun fully to realize that the experience wasn\u2019t just \u2014 from my point of view, at least \u2014 an comprehensible lapse that caused me a lot of pointless suffering; it had a deeply positive and purgative significance, for which I ought to thank my fate instead of cursing it. It thrust me into a drastic but, for that very reason, crucial confrontation with myself; it shook, as it were, my entire \u201cI,\u201d shook out of it a deeper insight into itself, a more serious acceptance and understanding of my situation\u2026 my horizons, and led me, ultimately, to a new and more coherent consideration of the problem of human responsibility. <\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

It is not hard to stand behind one\u2019s successes. But to accept responsibility for one\u2019s failures, to accept them unreservedly as failures that are truly one\u2019s own, that cannot be shifted somewhere else or onto something else, and actively to accept \u2014 without regard for any worldly interests, no matter how well disguised, or for well-meant advice \u2014 the price that has to be paid for it: that is devilishly hard! But only thence does the road lead \u2014 as my experience, I hope, has persuaded me \u2014 to the renewal of sovereignty over my own affairs, to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an uncertain enterprise, and to its transcendental meaning. And only this kind of inner understanding can ultimately lead to what might be called true \u201cpeace of mind,\u201d to that highest delight, to genuine meaningfulness, to that \u201cjoy of Being.\u201d If one manages to achieve that, then all one\u2019s worldly privations cease to be privations, and become what Christians call grace.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the years he spent in prison, Havel learned what it takes to turn suffering into strength<\/a> and discovered the deepest meaning of hope<\/a>. Upon his release, he threw himself with redoubled devotion into his political work. Not even a decade into his freedom, the Federal Assembly unanimously elected him president \u2014 the last president \u2014 of Czechoslovakia, after the dissolution of which a free people elected him the first president of the Czech Republic. Many survivors of communist dictatorships (myself included) lament that he was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But the writing he left behind in his Letters to Olga<\/em><\/strong><\/a> is an eternal triumph of peacekeeping for the war within, the war we each wage against ourselves and in which there are no victors unless we arrive at the kind of peace of mind Havel found on the other side of facing, truly facing, his failure.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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