Word: havel
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...Wiesel's moral authority that brought together Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela; Jimmy Carter and Francois Mitterrand; the authors Gunter Grass and Nadine Gordimer; Chai Ling and Li Lu, leaders of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square -- an astonishing collection of Nobel prizewinners, professors, rectors, saints. A man could not make his way through the SAS Scandinavia Hotel in Oslo without ricocheting off one paragon or another. Such saturations of virtue and celebrity gave me a jolt of anxiety: this is a perfect target for a bomb. But the choice of Oslo was canny. Norway has its immunities...
...enveloped in utter stillness, the most thorough self-possession I have ever beheld. Does 27 years in prison make a man so calm? As I listened to Gunter Grass (a stolid German with some huge gravity pulling him earthward) discussing the Nazis, my mind drifted to Vaclav Havel, who I decided is an alert woodland creature. Jimmy Carter shines with a likable sweetness, but he is tougher than you may think...
...Vaclav Havel began by confessing an incapacity to hate -- a suspect claim from most other men. "I look at hatred only as an observer," he said, and then proceeded to look at hatred as an artist does. He began with the psychology of individual hate: "It has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them and in fact the delegation of a piece of one's own identity to them . . . The hater longs for the object of his hatred...
...Hatred, Havel said, "is a diabolical attribute of the fallen angel: it is a state of the spirit that aspires to be God, that may even think it is God, and is tormented by indications that it is not and cannot be." The typical hater: "a serious face, a quickness to take offense, strong language, shouting, the inability to step outside himself and see his own foolishness...
What is the antidote? Education. Law. Justice. Charity. Love. I came at last to think that the subject in Oslo was not exactly hate, but on the dark side, evil, and on the other, hope. Havel said he is neither an optimist nor a pessimist: "I just carry hope in my heart. Hope is not a feeling of certainty, that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning." Hope is the thing with feathers. Or the thing in diapers...