Few issues in life are extra devastating than to offer one thing your all and nonetheless fail. Not the “fail higher” of startup tradition, not the “fail ahead” of self-help, not the failure that’s childhood’s fulcrum of studying, not the impressed errors that propel inventive danger, however merely that helpless and harrowing second if you face the abyss between your will and your powers, your values and your selections, your superb self and your actual self. It’s with out redemption, such failure. Nevertheless it needn’t be with out reward. Admitting failure, particularly ethical failure, is difficult sufficient — to others, the place the temptation to displace blame and make excuses seduces most, however most of all to oneself. Accepting it’s even tougher — however it’s on the opposite aspect of acceptance that the true reward of failure is to be discovered.

That’s what the good Czech playwright, essayist, and poet Václav Havel (October 5, 1936–December 18, 2011) explores in a rare feat of soul-searching and reckoning with the human situation, present in his Letters to Olga (public library), one of the crucial shifting books I’ve ever learn — the residing file of his imprisonment after being discovered responsible on expenses of “subversion” for his performs criticizing the communist regime and his human rights work defending the unjustly persecuted.

In the summertime of his forty-sixth yr, Havel recounts a second of ethical failure that formed the course of his life:

Pricey Olga,

5 years in the past one thing occurred tome that in lots of regards had a key significance in my subsequent life. It started quite inconspicuously: I used to be in detention for the firs time and one night, after interrogation, I wrote out a request to the Public Prosecutor for my launch. Prisoners in detention are all the time writing such requests, and I too handled it as one thing routine and unimportant, extra within the nature of psychological hygiene: I knew, after all, that my eventual launch or nonrelease can be determined by components having nothing to do with whether or not I wrote the suitable request or not. Nonetheless, the interrogations weren’t going wherever and it appeared correct to make use of the chance to let myself be heard. I wrote my request in a means that on the time appeared extraordinarily tactical and crafty: whereas saying nothing I didn’t consider or that wasn’t true, I merely “ignored” the truth that fact lies not solely in what is claimed, but additionally in who says it, and to whom, why, how and underneath what circumstances it’s expressed. Due to this minor “oversight” (extra exactly, this minor self-deception) what I mentioned got here dangerously shut — by probability, because it had been — to what the authorities wished to listen to. What was significantly absurd was the truth that my motive — at the very least my acutely aware and admitted motive — was not the hope that it might produce outcomes, however merely a type of professionally intellectualistic and considerably perverse enjoyment of my received — or so I believed — “honorable cleverness.” (I ought to add, to finish the image, that once I learn it some years later, the distinction in that cleverness made my hair stand on finish.) I despatched the request off the next day and since nobody responded to it and my detention was extended once more, I assumed it had ended up the place such requests normally find yourself, and I kind of forgot about it.

Havel was shocked to be informed sooner or later that he was more than likely going to be launched and “political use” can be fabricated from his petition. He recounts:

In fact I knew straight away what that meant: (1) that with acceptable “recasting,” “additions” and widespread publicity, the impression can be created that I had not held out, that I had given in to stress and backed down from my positions, opinions and all my earlier work; in brief, that I had betrayed my trigger, all for a trivial purpose — to get myself out of jail; (2) no denial or correction on my half would alter that impression as a result of I had undeniably written one thing that “met them midway” and something I may add would, fairly rightly, appear to be an try and worm my means out of it; (3) that the approaching disaster was unavoidable; (4) that the blot it might depart me on and all the pieces I had taken half in would hang-out me for years to come back, that it might trigger me measureless interior struggling, and that I might in all probability attempt to erase it with a number of years in jail (which in reality occurred), however that not even that might rid me fully of the stigma; (5) that I had nobody however myself in charge: I used to be neither compelled to do it, nor provided a bribe; I used to be not, in reality, in a dilemma and it was solely as a result of I’d unforgivably let down my ethical guard that I’d given the opposite aspect — voluntarily and fairly pointlessly — a weapon that amounted to a heaven-sent present.

The haunting value of self-knowledge is that you just all the time know, or some a part of you all the time is aware of, precisely what your personal ethical failures would value you. All Havel feared would occur is precisely what occurred:

I got here out of jail discredited, to confront a world that appeared to me one huge, supremely justified rebuke. Nobody is aware of what I went by in that darkest interval of my life… weeks, months, years in reality, of silent desperation, self-castigation, disgrace, interior humiliation, reproach and uncomprehending questioning. For some time I escaped from a world I felt too embarrassed to face into gloomy isolation, taking masochistic enjoyment of countless orgies of self-blame. After which for some time I fled this interior hell into frantic exercise by which I attempted to drown out my anguish and on the identical time, to “rehabilitate” myself one way or the other.

His solely relative reprieve got here when he was thrown into jail once more. Nevertheless it took him years to completely settle for his ethical failure and wrest from it one thing bigger, one thing the dream of blamelessness and the efficiency of perfection may ever safe for the lifetime of the soul. In a testomony to the indivisible yin-yang of fortune and misfortune illustrated by the traditional parable of the Chinese language farmer, he writes:

I’ve solely now begun totally to understand that the expertise wasn’t simply — from my viewpoint, at the very least — an understandable lapse that induced me lots of pointless struggling; it had a deeply constructive and purgative significance, for which I should thank my destiny as an alternative of cursing it. It thrust me right into a drastic however, for that very purpose, essential confrontation with myself; it shook, because it had been, my total “I,” shook out of it a deeper perception into itself, a extra critical acceptance and understanding of my scenario… my horizons, and led me, finally, to a brand new and extra coherent consideration of the issue of human duty.

[…]

It isn’t onerous to face behind one’s successes. However to just accept duty for one’s failures, to just accept them unreservedly as failures which are really one’s personal, that can not be shifted elsewhere or onto one thing else, and actively to just accept — with out regard for any worldly pursuits, regardless of how effectively disguised, or for well-meant recommendation — the value that needs to be paid for it: that’s devilishly onerous! However solely thence does the street lead — as my expertise, I hope, has persuaded me — to the renewal of sovereignty over my very own affairs, to a radically new perception into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an unsure enterprise, and to its transcendental that means. And solely this sort of interior understanding can finally result in what is perhaps referred to as true “peace of thoughts,” to that highest delight, to real meaningfulness, to that “pleasure of Being.” If one manages to realize that, then all one’s worldly privations stop to be privations, and turn into what Christians name grace.

Within the years he spent in jail, Havel discovered what it takes to show struggling into energy and found the deepest that means of hope. Upon his launch, he threw himself with redoubled devotion into his political work. Not even a decade into his freedom, the Federal Meeting unanimously elected him president — the final president — of Czechoslovakia, after the dissolution of which a free individuals elected him the primary president of the Czech Republic. Many survivors of communist dictatorships (myself included) lament that he was by no means awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. However the writing he left behind in his Letters to Olga is an everlasting triumph of peacekeeping for the conflict inside, the conflict we every wage towards ourselves and during which there are not any victors except we arrive on the type of peace of thoughts Havel discovered on the opposite aspect of dealing with, really dealing with, his failure.