To the Castle and Back by Vaclav Havel

Author:Vaclav Havel [Havel, Václav]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49832-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

(June 10, 2001)

1) Thank you for the briefing note for Brussels. The next time I would welcome it if they were a bit more comprehensible. A small example: “There already exist channels of communication… NEEA/PSC, NEEA/MS and a new suggestion, NEEA/MC. The consultations have made it possible for the NEEA to contribute to the development of the CESDP as well as the CFSP.” Such sentences, if there are a lot of them, fill me with terror and awaken a desire to simply get sick and go nowhere. (…)

3) I am a little depressed at the continual objections made by our heritage department against the creative plans of Borek Sípek. Why are they so attached to wooden gates, like a barn door, in the second courtyard, making it impossible for the various entranceways in this courtyard to reflect the same signature style, to create the effect of a conversation between the gates, and will mean that after my time in the Castle is over, something will remain that is not only beautiful but that has rhyme and reason? Or are those gates protected heritage sites? It seems to me that the issue is not saving the gates but some kind of jealous resistance to Sípek's artistry, (…) which I can only explain as a scarcely understandable but fatal preference for a totally soulless clumsiness as opposed to anything that is happy, light, decorative, and truly creative. (That's probably why the inventive plans by Kurt Gebauer to relandscape the Deer Moat were once, with no explanation or apology, tossed into the wastebasket.) I guess there's no disputing taste, but an aversion to any kind of ornamentation, inventiveness, or fantasy should not wrap itself in the noble garb of protecting our heritage. (…)

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