Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Jára Cimrman:
When Optimists Should Be Shot
“I am such a complete atheist that I am afraid God will punish
me.” Such is the pithy wisdom of Jára Cimrman, the man over-
whelmingly voted the “Greatest Czech of All Time” in a 2005
national poll. Who is Jára Cimrman? A philosopher? An explorer?
An inventor? He is all of these things, yes, and much more. Today,
a museum celebrates his life (see page 96).
Born in the mid-19th century to a Czech tailor of Jewish
descent and an Austrian actress, Cimrman studied in Vienna
before starting off on his journeys around the world. He traversed
the Atlantic in a steamboat he designed himself, taught drama to
peasants in Peru, and drifted across the Arctic Sea on an iceberg.
Other astounding feats soon followed. Cimrman was the first to
come within 20 feet of the North Pole. He was the first to invent
the light bulb (unfortunately, Edison beat him to the patent office
by five minutes). It was he who suggested to the Americans the
idea for a Panama Canal, though, as usual, he was never credited.
Indeed, Cimrman surreptitiously advised many of the world's
greats: Eiffel on his tower, Einstein on his theories of relativity,
Chekhov on his plays. (“You can't just have
two
sisters,” Cimrman
told the playwright. “How about three?”) In 1886, long before
the world knew of Sartre or Camus, Cimrman was writing tracts
such as
The Essence of the Existence,
which would become the
foundation for his philosophy of “Cimrmanism,” also known as
“non-existentialism.” (Its central premise: “Existence cannot not
exist.”)
This man of unmatched genius would have won the honor of
“Greatest Czech of All Time” if not for the bureaucratic narrow-
mindedness of the poll's sponsors, who had a single objection to
Cimrman's candidacy: He's not real. Jára Cimrman is the brain-
child of two Czech humorists—Zdeněk Svěrák and Jiří Šebánek—
who brought their patriotic Renaissance man to life in 1967 in a
satirical radio play. So, even though Cimrman handily won the
initial balloting in January of 2005, Czech TV officials—blatantly
biased against his non-existentialism—refused to let him into the
final rounds of the competition.
How should we interpret the fact that the Czechs would
shapes, a sharp contrast to the chubbiness of the Baroque figures
on the Charles Bridge and elsewhere in the city. The original stat-
ues were stolen by invading Swedish armies in 1648, and are still in
Sweden; the present replicas were cast in the early 1900s.
The Renaissance garden and the palace were built by Italian
architects, just like most of the Little Quarter. The theatrical
loggia—the
sala terena
—is a drama and music stage inspired by
Greek amphitheaters. Notice the unusual pairing of columns—
at the time, a trendy invention of the Italian architect Andrea
