Certainly, even something like this can be an impetus for a writer: timidity in love, the need to replace reality with fantasy and to project this fantasy into reality by endowing it with form. Literature, or any kind of art, can emerge from the life experience of the writer or from his fantasy, which elevates to reality.
I still remember the excitement I felt when on the first blank page in the black, narrow-lined notebook I signed my name and beneath that the title, Great Hearts. Beneath the title I wrote A Novel, which corresponded to my resolve to cover every single white page. The emptiness of the paper was thereby annulled. Then when I read over the sentences I had just composed, I trembled with joy when I saw that they formed a whole, a story that unfolded just like those in printed books. I couldn’t believe I was capable of something like this.
Every boy experiences something similar the first time he succeeds in constructing a kite from sticks, paper, and string, which then literally soars into the air.
Imparting form to something formless provides a certain satisfaction. You are intoxicated with the work, even if the form is imperfect or derivative, as long as, of course, what you have just created is recognizable.
Art obviously does not begin when you succeed in generating form out of formlessness; it begins when you are able to judge the caliber of your creation and not fall into raptures over the sole fact that you have created one of countless paper kites. At the time, however, I had no clue, and never again did I feel anything like the excitement I had when I filled the notebook with my artless and untutored sentences. The enthusiasm over the creation does not correspond directly to the quality of the thing created. Just the opposite: The creator never rids himself of doubts as to whether his construction will hold up even during his lifetime. The writer of mass-produced, popular works, on the other hand, is a stranger to these doubts and is convinced of the quality of his creation.
When I solemnly penned the words “The End,” I was ecstatic. I wasn’t even bothered by the fact that I’d left out the whole middle of the story.
Later, when I was moving out of the house, I placed all my manuscripts in a cardboard box that I stored in a closet next to the gas meter. As soon as I had my own apartment, I planned to return and retrieve it. After many years (I’d had my own family and apartment for a while), Mother asked me to finally come and fetch the box. I opened the closet and took out the box filled with faded manuscripts. They reeked of coal gas. I opened one of the notebooks at random and then one of the folders containing my unfinished epic. The quality of what I read was appalling.
I asked Mother to give the entire box to the schoolchildren when they came to collect paper. Thus like a coward I shrank back from carrying out this expurgatory act myself.
*
At the beginning of the war I had been baptized, but I didn’t realize this would entail any obligations at school. The vicar who taught religion in elementary school found out that although I was a member of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, I simply went home during religion class. He called me in and criticized me as an immoral blaspheming hoodlum and hooky player.
In the next class, unlike several of my evangelical classmates who considered religion class somewhere between school and the playground, I sat quietly like a model student and listened to the vicar’s enjoyable tale about how the Jews escaped from Israel. I couldn’t raise my hand because I knew absolutely nothing about this story, which, according to the vicar, was incontrovertibly true. The next time he was going over the material I raised my hand, and I soon became the teacher’s favorite pupil. Unfortunately, my education in God’s commandments and the tales of the ancient Israelites came to a premature end upon the decree that as a descendant of the aforementioned Israelites, I was banned from school.
Mindful that it was a matter of duty and my own salvation, I never missed an hour of religion class after the war. Father, however, raised me in his rational world, where you were not allowed to believe in anything that could not be proved by experiment or at least rationally explained. Religion, though, was expounded through inexplicable natural phenomena; it offered a primitive cosmology at a time when the earth was still the center of the universe. What I heard in religion class I therefore saw as the entrance to a fairy-tale world where miracles took place: Whales swallowed and spat out prophets with whom God himself would then converse; one could walk on water, and the sea would part before a raised staff; water could be turned into wine; the dead were brought back to life (even though they died later anyway); the blind could see; and angels visited people as God’s messengers, while evil spirits entered unclean swine. Now I was suddenly supposed to believe all of this: Jesus was the true Son of God, the God who in six days created the heavens, stars, earth, water, and every living creature. At the same time, however, Jesus was the father as well, since he was both Father and Son in one person, even though he was conceived by the Holy Ghost, and that was why he along with the Father and Son formed a Trinitarian being, which could not be understood by reason but only believed in.
Since childhood, I have been interested in the mystery of life, the inconceivability of eternity and infinitude, the inexplicability of the origin and eventual demise of the universe, the strange and abrupt divide between life and death. I had the firmest intention of penetrating the mysteries of being and without prejudice listening to all the conclusions people had hitherto arrived at. On Sundays I dutifully attended the church in Vinohrady and listened to the sermon. Even though it seemed removed from what I had experienced, I was all the more interested.
I was included among the confirmands, went through all the exercises, and memorized the necessary responses. After my confirmation I began to attend the youth meetings of our church. At these gatherings, which were attended by around fifteen boys my age, we prayed together, learned songs, and listened to a brief lecture or sermon. Sometimes we would go on an excursion or to the cinema, and, as was common at that time, we went on brigade trips, where all the participants, unlike my nonevangelical classmates, worked hard because pretending to work was dishonest.
Because I participated in these meetings and activities, and because I would pose interesting questions, the pastor suggested I become chair of our youth group.
It was my first serious appointment, and I resolved to take it responsibly.
Most of those who had been confirmed and came to the evangelical youth meetings had been raised in the faith. Since childhood they had attended Sunday school and church services, and they were used to praying. God, who sacrificed his Son to redeem humanity, was for them a given, and there was no need for speculation.
I, however, was raised in neither the Christian nor the Jewish tradition, and so everything I was now learning, everything I repeated and proclaimed, awoke within me questions and doubts.
I was fond of Greek mythology and had memorized entire passages retold in the Iliad, which would certainly have been blasphemous in the eyes of our vicar. There actually wasn’t any fundamental difference between the Greek image of the gods in human form and the image of a single God in human form, even though in the end, unlike the Greek gods, Jesus takes upon himself all of mankind’s powerlessness, and when he dies in torment calls out in the darkness that had gathered in the afternoon above the land of Israeclass="underline" My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Homer, however, had written of his own will; he had merely captured the tales or songs of his ancestors, whereas the writers of the biblical texts wrote not of their own will, but by God’s, and this guaranteed the veracity of their texts. This dogma did not convince me. Who was it who had claimed that the texts of the Bible arose from God’s will? Only their adherents.