I’m amazed I still have it – a dog-eared copy of Esquire magazine from October 1993. It was a 60th Anniversary edition, titled “60 Things Every Man Should Know”, filled with essays from big thinkers like Norman Mailer and Ice-T, ruminating on such pressing subjects as boxing and sex doggy-style.  It sits in a tin box in my storage unit, along with a stack of somewhat less-distinguished publications, like my signed copy of Playboy with Katarina Witt on the cover, or the low-rent trade journal featuring the first article I ever got paid to write.

To be honest, I don’t know why I’ve kept that Esquire so long, since there’s only one essay in it I really care about, and I can practically recite it from memory.   It’s an essay on hope by then-Czech president Vaclav Havel, who died today.

At the time, I was only vaguely aware of who Vaclav Havel was.  I knew him as something of an Eastern European Nelson Mandela, but since I was neither Czech nor Slovak nor cared that much for velvet,  I paid little attention to his exploits.

Havel’s essay brought him into sharp focus for me. After reading it, I started to learn more about him. I realized Havel was the kind of Better Man I wished to be: brave, principled, idealistic, decent, but above all…hopeful, in precisely the sense he describes below.

The kind of hope he talks about isn’t diminished by failure, or enhanced by success.  Sometimes you hear people say that hope can be a killer, but Havel’s kind of hope gives comfort, because it comes from a deeper, more elemental place. With this kind of hope, the outcome of events has no bearing on its intrinsic value.  No doubt it’s why I’ve returned to this essay many times over the past few years, and why it will continue to resonate with me as I try to teach my little girl about hope.

Probably the most important thing about Havel’s essay is that he puts the burden of  finding hope on each of us – it’s not something anyone can give to you.  Bear in mind Havel was himself a symbol of hope for Czechoslovakians, yet here he is telling people that the meaning they may find in his struggle is nothing compared to the meaning they may find in their own.  As with all things, the answers lie within us. It’s my hope that I can equip Ava with the tools she needs to find hope within herself, just as Vaclav Havel did.  I suspect she’ll find it in the same place as resilience, and integrity.

There’s little more I can add to his words, except to say that I’m grateful for having discovered them, and I’m sad there won’t be more:

Never Hope Against Hope

by Vaclav Havel

Allow me to tell you a little story about the nature of hope and absurdity. In 1989, only a few months before I was to become, to my bewilderment, an actual head of sate, I survived my own death.

I had arrived in the countryside outside Prague at a place called Okrouhlice to visit artist friends. After a feast by a bonfire, I led a friend who had had too much to drink down a dark path toward a house nearby. In this total darkness, though completely sober, I suddenly fell into a black hole surrounded by a cement wall. The fact is, I had fallen into a sewer, into what can only be called, you’Il excuse me, shit.

My attempt to swim in this fundamental mud, this strange vegetation was in vain, and I began to sink deeper into the ooze. Meanwhile, a tremendous panic broke out above me. Local citizens flashed lights, grasped one another’s arms, legs, offering limbs, articles of clothing to grab; a chaos or rescue techniques followed. This brave fight for my life went on for at least thirty minutes.  I could barely keep my nose about this dreadful effluvium and thought this was the end, what a way to go, when someone had the fine idea of putting down a long ladder.

Who could have known I was to leave this unfortunate sewer only to end up in the president’s office two months later? I was not, after all, to have the distinction of becoming the first playwright to drown in shit in Okrouhlice.

What was striking about the sewer experience was how hope had emerged from hopelessness, from absurdity. I’ve always been deeply affected by the theatre of the absurd because, I believe, it shows the world as it is, in a state of crisis. It shows man having lost his fundamental metaphysical certainty, his relationship to the spiritual, the sensation of meaning – in other words, having lost the ground under his feet.  As I’ve said in my book Disturbing the Peace, this is a man for whom everything is coming apart, whose world is collapsing, who senses he has irrevocably lost something but is unable to admit this to himself and therefore hides from it.

Complete skepticism is an understandable consequence of discovering one’s enthusiasms are based on an illusion. This skepticism leads to a dehumanization of history – a history drifting somewhere above us, taking its own course,  having nothing to do with us, trying to cheat us, destroy us, playing out its cruel jokes.

But history is not something that takes place elsewhere; it takes place here. We all contribute to making it. If bringing back some human dimension to the world depends on anything, it depends on how we acquit ourselves in the here and now.

The kind of hope I often think about (especially in hopeless situations like prison or the sewer) is, I believe, a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t.  Hope is not a prognostication – it’s an orientation of the spirit. Each of us must find real, fundamental hope within himself. You can’t delegate that to anyone else.

Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permits its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.

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