Intuition and the Creation of a Better World
Havel, Vaclav
I believe that with the loss of God, man has lost a kind of absolute and universal system of coordinates, to which he could always relate anything, chiefly himself. His world and his personality gradually began to break up into separate, incoherent fragments corresponding to different relative coordinates. And when this happened, man began to lose his inner identity, that is, his identity with himself. Along with it, of course, he lost a lot of other things, too, including a sense of his own continuity, a hierarchy of experience and values, and so on. It's as if we were playing for a number of different teams at once, each with different uniforms, and as though - and this is the main thing - we didn't know which one we ultimately belonged to, which of those teams was really ours.
Vaclav Havel, from an interview with Jiri Lederer
