Black holes
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Abstract
write, read or speak it, people in a totalitarian system are able, when I think of the future even willing, to live in an entirely different reality; and this is what terrifies me most. For example, our colleagues in the Writers Union or in the publishing houses know only too well about us, but because they dare not take the slightest risk, it is they who tell us to be quiet. I am writing about Orwell and I have to confess: I was able to read a typed copy of the samizdat Czech translation produced by 'Padlock Editions', which I had to return within 48 hours. I have no way of verifying whether my interpretation is accurate and correct. This is nothing exceptional: all my work, and most of the work of my colleagues, is close to guesswork and suffers from vagueness. The fact that we have no access to information produces uncertainty, and uncertainty engenders scepticism, halfheartedness, parochialism. A culture that lives underground is inevitably distorted, as is — though in different ways — the second-rate literature which is published officially! I can well imagine how difficult it may be to capture a reading public in an otherwise well-organised society. And yet publicity, the regular and meaningful registration of all that is going on in the world around us, is an accepted and long-term form of help; whereas we have nothing to ward off despotic authorities. There is one real safeguard in the long run, common to both worlds: civic courage and responsibility. Not only a totalitarian State but even the most perfect democracy needs these constantly, since without them democracy is sucked up into mammoth political parties, into the strangest government coalitions and into barely mediocre politicians. The politician who today pursues politics alone — albeit by democratic rules — will slowly but surely become the prisoner of an unreal world and questionable myths. In the coming decades he will be useless and ridiculous, like a soldier telling endless tales about a distant battle, the only one he ever took part in. The struggle for party jobs becomes a farce at the moment modern technology is capable of calculating the optimal solution of a given problem. He who successfully sifts his way through party apparatuses will hardly become a great politician but rather a righteous personality in the ethical and cultural sense. Once this is achieved, two clever statesmen could no longer appear on television screens all over the world in an absurd spectacle to sign an agreement which not even they themselves believe to be as epoch-making as they claim. Of course, we are all glad there will be fewer nuclear weapons, but I am one of those