Death is a message; it talks; the act of dying has it own semantics and it is not unimportant how a man dies, and in which element.

Jan Masaryks life ended in 1948 with a fall into the courtyard of a Prague palace, after he had seen his destiny shattered by the hard shell of History. Three years later the poet Konstantin Biebl, frightened by the face of the world he had helped to bring about, threw himself from a sixth floor onto the pavement of the same city (the city of defenestrations), perishing on the element earth and with his death offering an image of the tragic discord between the air and weight, between dream and awakening.

Jan Hus and Giordano Bruno could not have died by the rope or by the sword; they could have died only at the stake. Their lives thus became the incandescence of a signal light, the beam of a lighthouse, a torch shining far into the space of time. For the body is ephemeral and thought is eternal and the flicker of fire is the image of thought. Jan Palach, who twenty years after Jaromil's death drenched himself with gasoline in a Prague square and set his body afire, would have been less likely to succeed in making his cry ring out to the nation's consciousness as a man who had drowned.

On the other hand Ophelia is inconceivable afire and had to die by water, for the depth of water converges with the depths of the human soul; water is the exterminating element of those who have been led astray in their own selves, in their love, in their feelings, in their madness, in their mirrors and their whirlwinds; in old folk songs girls whose fiances fail to return from war drown themselves; Harriet Shelley threw herself into the water; Paul Celan drowned in the Seine.