Free Notes From Underground by Roger Scruton Page A

the freedom to command the thoughts and feelings of an audience, and to come before them as a guide.
    I looked around at the books shelved side by side from floor to ceiling, some leather-bound in glazed cases, others with the neat cloth covers of the First Republic, their spines embossed with streamlined lettering, their irregular sizes and experimental colors the outward signs of the same freedom that spoke through Rudolf—a freedom that lived in words, and which was exhaled like a breeze when you opened the covers of a book. Rudolf was reading from the book on his desk, the
Two Studies of Masaryk
, some copies of which Mother had managed to distribute, but which Rudolf seemed to possess in a neat edition from an exile press. The passage spoke of the twentieth-century wars, of the reckless night in which the price of everyday senselessness is paid.
    Pato č ka’s drastic words, mixing philosophical technicalities and frightening invocations of an all-encompassing destruction, were like spells, summoning the ghosts of our ruined country into the room. And around me I sensed the held breath, the intent stares into nothing that bound us together in a conspiracy of apartness. In the new kind of night, Rudolf read, into which the soldier goes without purpose, lies the reality of sacrifice, and in sacrifice an awareness of freedom. My own reality as a soul, whose nature is to care, is brought home to me; in the moment of sacrifice comes an intimation of the meaning that daylight had bleached away. In that moment I break out of the prison of the everyday, and there, in life at the apex, I experience the only form of
polis
which we may now attain, the “solidarity of the shattered.”
    I write these words now in suburban Washington, looking down on a quiet street where mothers pass with prams and wheelchairs, and a few old people walk their dogs. And the words are like dreamdebris, washed up in the weary light of dawn. It is only with a certain effort that I recall their sound in Czech. But when Rudolf pronounced them on that evening twenty years ago, a shudder passed through the room. This
solidarita ot ř esených
was a presence among us and I felt it on my arm like the grip of a neighbor in a shared moment of fear. No tragedy, no ritual performance, no encounter of warriors on the eve of battle, could have been more charged with feeling than the room in which we sat. We were assembled on that floor in a state of total togetherness. We were side by side, sharing life, hope, and danger in our own threatened space. The faces all around were focusing on Nothing with intense and seeking stares. I had the impression that it wanted only the fatal knock on the door for a great smile of acceptance to sweep across our faces like a burst of sunlight. Betka, however, seemed to withhold herself, and I let my eyes dwell on that calm, collected face, astonished by its beauty.
    When Rudolf had finished reading, he looked round in a kind of triumph, emphasizing with his fierce eyes and rigid posture that we had been led into another realm, where truth alone was the goal. He alluded to writers whom I had never encountered, to books that I could never have read, to a world of reasoning and feeling that stood before me like a pool into which I wanted to jump and be cleansed of my isolation. And he illustrated everything with thoughts of his own, connecting the most abstruse arguments to our daily routines of selfishness.
    â€œAll the things that are required of us,” he said, “like queuing for essentials, pulling strings, reporting on our friends and colleagues, marching on May Day, are so much easier to do for selfish than for noble motives. Who could queue for two hours simply in order that a child in Africa should be saved from starving? Who could betray his colleagues in order to prepare his own martyrdom as their leader? But to do these things for a loaf of bread—nothing is easier.”
    He went on to