by George F. Kennan
7 December 1940

Dear Jeanette:

This letter may arrive before I do, or I may arrive before the letter does; or one or both of us may never arrive. But when I am in Prague, I simply have to write. It has been that way ever since I arrived here on the weird day of Munich in 1938. And now when I come here from all the sterile newness of Berlin and walk about in these venerable shabby streets, I can't keep still.

I have written so many formal things about this part of the world that I think I have paid my due to literary discipline and decorum and am entitled to indulge just once in the “stream of consciousness” stuff. I even wonder whether it isn’t possible the only proper approach to this dreamy, poignant place, which has a thousand tales to tell and proves nothing at all, unless it is the incorrigible vanity and tragedy and futility of all human endeavor. In all the history of Bohemia there have never been any clear issues, any complete victories or any complete defeats.

I know no place which makes more mockery of the present – no place where one is more conscience of the transience of one’s self and one’s own generation and of everything that is being done.

The consulate general was closed several weeks ago. I am more or less responsible for the arrangements made for the custody and preservation of the property, which belongs to the government, and I have come down for a day or two on a tour of inspection.

I walk around the premises of the old palace that once housed our legation, give orders for the repair of the retaining wall in the garden, decide what shall be planted next spring, make plans for the disposal of the old, unused Renaissance wing, ponder the condition of the wooden frames of the three-thousand-odd windowpanes.

All the time I am conscious of the fact that all this has been done hundreds of times before, over the ages, by innumerable counts and cardinals and custodians and architects, that each time it was done, it seemed important to the people who were doing it, that they have some sort of plans, for the utilization of the great structure, and that they hoped that it would be possible to utilize the place in a way commensurate with its power and dignity. And all the time I feel that the old building is laughing skeptically at me and musing:

Man built me as a framework for great doings, for lofty decisions, for the exercise of power. I was to symbolize his strength and his grandeur. And yet in all the centuries of all my existence there have not been five years in a hundred when he was able to fill my wall with anything remotely adequate, remotely representative. My rooms have stood year after year, cold and empty. No horses stamp in my marble stables. Owner after owner has either lost the means or lacked the stature to walk through my halls as one who belonged in them.

The Loreta, Prague

Either princes of the Church have lived - for poverty - in my servants' quarters; or mean little men, awed by massive ceilings and lofty walls, lonely and uneasy in these trappings of greatness, have camped like mice in my most splendid chambers. I have been a dream to which man has never been able to live up.

And meanwhile, the seasons have come and gone. The snows of winter have sifted it onto the huge rafters of the garret; in spring, year after year, the blossoms of the fruit trees in the upper gardens have fluttered down onto my window ledges; on countless days the faint showers of midsummer have swept over the hill and cooled the hot tiles of my roof; in autumn dead leaves have blown in whirlpools in the courtyards; the winds have screamed through the archways on the long black nights. The bells of the nearby churches have rung the hours for centuries. The cobbles of the streets outside have echoed for untold days with the footsteps of men, marching in triumph, fleeing in terror and despair, or trudging obscurely, mechanically, up and down the hill.

All this I have seen. It has remained this way for centuries. It will remain this way for centuries to come. Nothing has changed very much; no one has lasted very long.

And now you come, clothed (apologies to my childhood friend Shakespeare) in a little brief authority; you tinker around like the rest of them; and you dream your dreams of putting me to use; and yet you are intelligent enough to know that you, too, are here only for a day, that you and all you stand for will soon be gone; but that I shall stand on, superior to those that created me, a monument to man's folly and inadequacy, a mockery of his endeavor.