A man close to my heart, as it were. A rare and cherished compatriot—one of us. (A Slovak writer.) Another man who relies upon simple techniques: being aware of his urge to go back, to give in, to make up, he, just like me, started burning the remaining bridges. A special kind of cowardice. Two thousand heroic words every once in a while usually suffices. He thus insulated himself, and there we met. Actually, we met in a book. I saw him perform in a couple of other books, but the first impression was decisive. (For instance, I did not like The Axe too much.) My empathy developed gradually, as I went along, the remaining bridges smoldering behind my back.

And now, more than ten years and three centuries since 1968, I am simply fond of him. A man whose name surfaces in my intermittent monologue quite often. Unrecorded. A name that means something by itself. Ludvik Vaculik. Insulated by pride and spite and pain and a glimmer of hope. Perhaps there will always be a couple of cowards, just like us, with an urge to go back and reconsider, who will also have a knack for simple techniques that can hardly fail. In the world populated by mechanical men, reversible in accordance with the laws of Classical Mechanics, there will always be a few of those capable of imposing upon themselves the rigors of time’s arrow: irreversibility. And what more can one ask for, once the bridges have gone? A mute neighbor, a name…

Addendum (June 6, 2015)

Quite by chance, I just discovered that Ludvik Vaculik died earlier today. Born in 1926, he was eighty-eight. Sadly, we exchanged only a few letters in 2006 (“Out of This World: A Letter to Ludvik Vaculik,” March 21, 2006). But the first thing that I noticed in the article announcing Vaculik’s death was that he was a Czech rather than a Slovak writer. When I wrote the original piece, the mistake was of little consequence, if any, but the world has changed in the meanwhile. And how. Czechs and Slovaks are far apart by now. Luckily, they are much closer than Croats and Serbs, who could only have learned from their northern brethren how to split up without bloodshed. Returning to Vaculik, he will remain a man close to my heart. One of us. A fellow dissident to remember till my last breath. A tear is welling up already…