How It’s New York: A lot of New Yorkers have spent time in Prague, and/or had their lives touched by Václav Havel.
How It’s Irish: You could say he wrote his own epitaph. This is not uniquely Irish, but it’s also Irish. And of course, Celto-Slav.
We put up three posts about Václav Havel, who died yesterday, so this will be the last– but not because there isn’t so much more to say, and much more too on the web (A nice piece in the New York Times, written a few years back by the late Mel Gussow; a literary consideration in the Prague Post; a video of Paul Wilson, one of Havel’s lifelong translators, talking about him on Al Jazeera, and this lovely appreciation by John Allison at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who was in Prague in the 90s too). This comes to us via Michael Reisman, husband of Books Editor Michelle Woods, and an erstwhile Prague-r himself, where we all met. Along with talking about the man, it’s good to include an example of his wisdom. Michael sent us this:
“For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?”
–Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
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| Michelle and Gwen at the Wilma Theatre for the Opening of Leaving, in 2010– Havel in the back |
