Elsewhere

Where does hope come from? Vaclav Havel, who has given the question considerable thought, finally concludes that it comes from “elsewhere.” The gift and virtue of hope “transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.” For Havel, hope’s “deepest roots are in the transcendental,” though Havel himself “can’t . . . say anything concrete about the transcendental.”

Yet Havel speaks quite concretely about what hope is not. We cannot properly understand hope “as a mere derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favorable sign in the world.” Hope does not derive from any sense of “joy” that “things are going well” or might be “headed for early success.” We do not experience hope because we imagine that something “stands a chance to succeed.” Therefore: “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

In 1975, Havel was a 39 year old playwright who had been censored and banned by Czechoslovakia’s unreconstructed Communist regime. He had spent most of 1974 working in a brewery in Bohemia. In April of 1975, he wrote a letter to Dr. Gustav Husak, the General Secretary of the nation’s Communist Party. In the letter, Havel describes a deepening “spiritual and moral crisis of society” lurking beneath the orderly “surface” of the dictatorship. And why is this crisis growing? Because Dr. Husak’s regime draws its life from “the worst in us”: “egotism, hypocrisy, indifference, cowardice, fear, resignation, and the desire to escape every personal responsibility, regardless of the general consequences.” He signed the letter “Vaclav Havel, Writer,” stamped it himself, and took it to the post office. He never heard from Husak, other than an assurance from an assistant that the leader was too busy to read it. Several years later, they put him in jail.

Forget the fact that Havel is now president of the Czech Republic, or that his unanswered 1975 letter to Dr. Husak is now recognized as one of the great letters of our century, in some ways analogous to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” What’s worth remembering is that in 1975, when, according to almost everyone, there were virtually no “favorable signs” in Communist Czechoslovakia that things might “turn out well,” Havel determined that it “made sense” to write a letter Dr. Gustav Husak, urging him in utterly good faith to “consider seriously the matters to which I have tried to draw your attention.” That is hope. And it comes from “elsewhere.”

Sources: Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 181; and “Letter to Dr. Husak,” in Living in Truth (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 3-35.

First published Spring 1999.