Impermissible Thoughts

...Since that day no one has approached me, but at least 15 other people have been interrogated in connection with me...

...Moreover, I dont't know what they teach at Vienna University, but at Charles University they tell law students that "Preparation to commit a criminal offense is punishable by the same term as the offense itself" (para...

...For instance: Where does a man's personality end...

...Our country is one of the developed ones which, when viewed in relation to the world's poverty, can well be said to be spoiled...

...You were thinking of famine, illiteracy, disease, and war...

...Perhaps you can understand what I mean when I say that I wrote them because I had succumbed to the impression that I was at home in my flat, where no one can see or hear me...

...Whenever I put a sheet of paper in my typewriter I seem incapable of writing anything but some kind of protest...

...Dear Secretary General: IN OUR neighboring countries, which for a period in history had formed a single entity, it used to be the custom to begin letters with a flowery opening in which one wished the recipient God's blessing, the protection of saintly patrons, patience in the trials of everyday life, and lasting health...

...SINCE THAT warlike incident last April I cannot collect my thoughts regarding that absent book-inprogress...

...In April of this year you visited Prague...

...If that were so, I would find it difficult to understand the sentence in your speech as Doctor h.c...

...And in my case—a man with two pending cases—you would no doubt throw the book at me, if you will pardon the expression...

...It is therefore sufficient for me to: 1. give the manuscript to a typist for copying...

...One of Ludvik Vakulik's novels is reviewed on page 219...

...And it cannot be put right merely by someone duly returning our manuscripts to me and my friend Kosik (and we are by no means the only ones...

...I merely wished to make clear the difference between two types of doctorate, which have developed in this dear old basin of ours between the Alps, the Carpathians, and the Sudetenland...

...I finally decided to write to you for the following reasons: my anger and feelings of outrage remain unabated, indeed are growing...

...Who was supposed to be guilty of this crime they did not say...

...By this timely step, no more difficult than inoculation, it will be possible—naturally in the interests of peace and friendship on our planet Earth—to avert the danger that there might remain somewhere a single seed of future courage and national honor...

...here in Prague: "The condition of the world presents us with a great deal that is deeply disturbing and much that gives grounds for hope...

...It is a novel whose plot is interspersed with notes and comments about the landscape, people, and history...

...7, clause 2 of the Penal Code...

...Again nothing happened, no indictment was ever drafted, but the proceedings have not been called off to this day, no one has told me anything, so that I do not know where I stand, which is what ought to have been done and would be done under a more normal legal system...

...on the contrary it would be far worse for someone to separate the children from the fate of their parents and thus break the continuity of the family's consciousness (or that of a nation, or the population of a whole continent...

...Every state that wishes to appear in civilized company at splendid international conferences considers it necessary to guarantee freedom of the individual in its constitution...

...As a Czech, for instance, surely I share the blame for the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a long time before I was born...

...The rest I could perhaps only tell you as a metaphysical accomplice...

...What is this...

...We reprint this letter from the English journal Index...

...Among the things that I may thus have lost is the manuscript of a book on which I have been working for several years...

...It was late at night, say, and I felt sad or angry...

...Now I find hovering over me coresponsibility for the Helsinki conference and its, as yet unknown and unexpected, consequences...

...I rather suspect that the postponed trial back in 1970 did take place, after all: in the absence of the public and of the accused...

...I even think (to my shame, again not without malice) that a state that excludes some child from its good graces is doing its best to nurture in its subjects the seeds of future courage and national honor...

...Eqs...

...A sober inner voice told me: "Don't be an ass...

...The time I had set myself in which to wait for them either to explain what it is I am supposed to have done or to apologize is up...

...Now mine is a hard nut for a lawyer to crack, Doctor...

...And of course he who shares the responsibility ought to have the decency to keep quiet and not add his voice to the indictment...

...in order to curtail my social contacts and limit my activity in general to a few meaningless existential movements...

...Thus, if I lend it to friends or, worse still, have it published abroad, I'll commit the offense of spreading disaffection...

...That is, so to speak, my metaphysical responsibility...

...The world rejoices at the sight of Americans and Russians, up there in space, screwing a joint vessel together, and here I am, down on earth, with my pettifogging worries about my papers...

...As an author I harbor the fear that this will be no thriller...

...In my country this has now become doubtful, Doctor, and I am telling you about it because, unless it is nipped in the bud, we shall have created an ugly European precedent...

...Accept my renewed apologies, and to show that I do not for a moment believe you could have become such a lawyer and judge, let me confide in you that my confiscated manuscript really did contain things that were tantamount to disaffection in our pre-Helsinki conditions...

...But the months are going by and I have come to realize what I have to live with, day in day out: with the expectation that they'll turn up again, or subpoena me to go and see them, and with a wretched feeling of gratitude for every uneventful day...

...This criminal offense is committed if one acquaints at least two people with the incriminating statement or text...

...These instruments will then, at a later stage of development, make it possible to direct the movements of populations from two spacecraft, one of which will fly above the Western and the other above the Eastern hemisphere...

...I felt offended, yet at the same time I was glad that nothing worse had happened to me...

...Dear Secretary General, that is almost all I had in mind...

...In which case it would not be a misfortune and a punishment for the children to share their parents' fate...

...If I am writing a "harmful" book, I naturally intend someone to read it, therefore I am preparing to commit a criminal offense...

...I have decided to write to you after much deliberation as to whether this is really the thing to do...

...According to the new criminal code it would appear that I do not have to be the alleged culprit for the proof to be sought in my dwelling...

...Hitherto it seemed to be permissible for a man to juggle thoughts from one half of his skull to the other...

...as a journalist and writer I belonged to Her Majesty's internal opposition (this comes under moral responsibility...

...And, lest I forget, above all, health, patience in your daily trials, and the harmless protection of saintly patrons...

...From this it is only a step—in any other potential country—to the placing of instruments under the heads of newlyborn babies to plot the course of their thoughts as they travel from the left to the right hemisphere...

...As for criminal responsibility, I neither feel it nor look for it...

...Is he, though, also to be allowed to cast them (continued on page 215) 206 NOTEBOOK in front of him onto his desk in order to get a better look at them and put them in order...

...I thought of writing to you then, but I dismissed the idea as being somewhat eccentric...

...However, on the first level of reality we all— they as well as we—act more in accordance with our daily roles than our better inclinations...

...It is not only my opinion that it requires greater care in its implementation...

...And I am spinning a layman's essay on the law, which I have decided to publish, this being the purpose behind my letter...

...And even that only, dear Doctor, if we both could be sure of at least a square meter of privacy in this dear old basin of ours...

...Is this possible in any other country in peacetime...

...One day before this date, the trial was postponed indefinitely and the public told that in fact there was to have been no trial and that the, whole thing was a malicious rumor...

...I mean a country with a European tradition...

...After all, what're you complaining about...

...But deep inside, when looking at the whole business somewhat more metaphysically, I am not really all that annoyed: that, I say to myself, is how it goes in this world, and who knows, maybe it is as it should be...

...And that is why I find it difficult to live in a state of enmity with anyone, which you, Secretary General, will no doubt find easy to understand...

...And in the meantime something else has Prague July 29, 1975 happened which sounds a warning—the joint space flight of Apollo and Soyuz...

...Or do you perhaps think that this is just pie in the sky on my part, following the age-old custom of guilty ironymongers and skeptical optimists...

...That is not a literary exaggeration but a factual deduction...

...At the end of April this year I was visited by a group of members of the State Security...

...They came, with the approval of the Public Prosecutor, to carry out a house search because, they said, I was suspected of concealing written materials that provided proof of subversion of the Republic...

...I look forward eagerly to your reply...

...Yet it is this that they are constantly trying to pin on me...

...I myself do not as yet know how the book will end, what I'll add and what delete, but our State Security already knows that it's going to be a harmful book...

...I see that in an attempt to underline the foregoing paragraph I automatically, logically and truthfully mentioned my sons...

...I should like to ask you, Secretary General, to pass it on to a team of jurists so they can express an opinion on it...

...2. lend it to my friend Karel Kosik (he, too, had a manuscript confiscated but this was a philosophical treatise and they must find it heavy going...

...There I was sentenced to an unknown term for an unknown crime—I and my sons...

...It is intended to be a specifically Czech work and, if I am very lucky and it turns out well, I would hope that it might be of interest to other, philosophically inclined readers from the basin bordered by the Alps, the Carpathians, and the Sudetenland...

...In the autumn of 1973 new criminal proceedings were opened against me for an interview I had given a British TV company...

...What is one to call such a state of affairs...

...As a former member of the Communist party I share the moral responsibility for what grew out of the collective 204 revolutionary ideal of social justice in some kind of a higher, "people's," form of democracy...

...On that occasion Charles University added the title of Doctor of law honoris causa to your regular law degree from Vienna University, and you said: "Some two-thirds of mankind live in conditions that are quite alien to the developed world...

...Apart from anything else, once legal proceedings are started, the person concerned can be sent to prison, for example because of a "resumption of criminal activity," which could be applied to me if I again appeared on foreign television or wrote to the United Nations...

...the most menial office or function...

...It was sent after the police had raided the homes of writers, historians, and philosophers, confiscating books, notes, and manuscripts of work in progress...

...And so I put my thoughts on paper, freely and without restraint, like before the war...

...None of the confiscated things has been returned to me...

...Yours sincerely, LUDVIK VACUUK q Prague 7, Veletrzni 21 215...

...And it is when I think of them that I again feel impelled to express myself with moderation, seeing everything on a higher plane and wondering whether everything that is happening is not happening for a good reason and perhaps even through my own fault—and maybe it even has a meaning that makes sense of it all...

...In my youth I started the Second World War and later participated in the creation and fossilization of the two zones of the Europe...

...Or during the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire...

...That is why I tell myself more and more frequently that I—or we—have what we wanted, that I and we cannot blame anyone else for the conditions in which we have to live...

...I have three...

...It is the greatest European discovery throughout the whole of our history...

...NOTEBOOK 205 When the search was over, various objects (chiefly books, magazines, notes, manuscripts borrowed from friends, correspondence, photographs, tape recordings) were taken away, but nothing had been found that would qualify as "illegal printed matter...

...Is there a legal term to cover it, at least in times of peace...

...Forgive me, Secretary General, for conjuring up such an ugly image, but at least you can see what kind of a person I am and what it is that irritates them about me...

...Otherwise I see no guarantee to prevent the police, intent on protecting law and order with even greater alacrity, from entering my flat as soon as I sit down at my desk and asking me: "What is it you are going to think about now...

...I have been deprived of my passport, degraded from a first lieutenant in reserve to a private (not that I mind), and am subjected to surveillance (my mail, telephone calls, friends, contacts with abroad, sexual life, etc...

...A quarter of a year has now passed since an event which deeply offended me...

...Something more is required...

...Thus it is possible to search any flat, and then something will be found or it will not...

...The petition expressed disagreement with the way things had gone since August 1968...

...In the autumn of 1969, proceedings were started against me on charges of subversion because I had been coauthor of a petition addressed to the highest authorities in the country...

...May I now be allowed a literary exaggeration: if by some mischance you had in recent years been awarded not an honorary doctorate at Charles University but a regular doctorate of law, and if you then had become a judge in this country, you would today, the six hundred years of Charles University notwithstanding, have to sentence many a Czech writer according to para...

...In the more matterof-fact usage of the day, let me wish you at least the health, patience in your trials, and protection of saintly patrons...

...In the meantime I wish you confidence in the meaningfulness of your work, and also success...

...Naturally I have to defend myself against this, I fume and call down imprecations on their heads...

...my complaint about infringement of the law that I sent to the Public Prosecutor was passed on to the interrogator about whom I had complained...

...Come along with us...

...This freedom happens to be inseparable from the concept of Europe...

...In the autumn of 1970 an indictment was issued against the eight authors of the petition and a date set for the trial...

...Not in the building of the Municipal Court but in the dusty attic of some anonymous house, as Franz Kafka described it with such foresight...

...All right, they crawled into your flat, rummaged about in your life, carried away some of your effects, but you are innocent, so why not wait a bit...

...One cannot help but ponder on one's own responsibility according to Jasper's scale: from criminal responsibility to the metaphysical...

...I fail to find any direct political responsibility in my case, since I never gained sufficient confidence within the Party to be entrusted with even...

...100 to three years' imprisonment for a manuscript captured on his desk, and if he actually handed the manuscript over for publication, then to between one and five years...

...Or as if it was peacetime...