Ordinary life from Karel Čapek's noetic trilogy
An Ordinary Life was written as a personal confession of a ministerial official and former railway stationmaster. It is the testimony of a dying man who decided to write his biography of an "ordinary man," for there are many biographies of extraordinary people, but almost no one writes about the ordinary man. He believes that nothing strange or remarkable has happened in his life. It's like everything is pre-planned and he's just going on a straight line.
Gradually it turns out that his life was far from being as ordinary as he had deluded himself into believing. The old railwayman recognises, thanks to his inner voices, that it is impossible to simplify human life to a mere sequence of events. More and more he philosophizes whether we are able to know ourselves, all our selves, and to suppress selfishness in our actions.
In the end, we will understand with him that no human life can be ordinary, but always unique and full of variety. Man is a multitude of real and possible persons - and that's okay, because that's why we can know and understand multiplicity, because we ourselves are such a multiplicity! Even the most ordinary life is infinite, the value of every soul is immense.
The free trilogy Hordubal, Povětroň, Obyčejný život is the artistic peak of Karel Čapek's work. The stories do not connect people, places and events.
