"I do not have to remember, because it was at Lipno on a vacation with father and in the morning under the cliffs there appeared a, how was it called, the white thing, napkins, I cannot recall it, I'm getting old. And on it there was: 'Saldáty, iditě damoj!' because from fourth grade we learned Cyrillic and I knew how to read it. And I think, that the invasion probably shortened and changed our vacation by a few days, and the greatest mystery was to ride through the main train station, it might have been twenty-two, twenty-three, more or less. And so it was the army, and while it was thee hundred metres from the Museum, the atmosphere was very live and intense there. And then, we were already fifteen back then let's say, then one of the barracks were in Turnov and that was a change, because they had colour television and microwaves and bonbons and all these things, and so people went there, but nonetheless, when there was a Pioneer camp somewhere in those spaces, then at those twelve or thirteen years old you were terrified, when boys were walking there with machine guns, you did not understand them fully and you did not know, what to think of it, and so it was an adventure."
"I say, how I am slow and stupid, and so I stepped out of the Union by myself, when I went to mandatory military service, so it was 1980, 81. And actually it was interesting, because I did it in the service, it was this no man's land, and after ten months it they realized it: 'And you are not a union man?' And I said: 'No.' 'Why not?' I said: 'Because I figured out, that it is no longer my path.' And so they were staring at me because of it, how can one not be a union man, I only had a military rank, I was a Freiter for a long time. And so later it was interesting, and then of course at work [...] And so it was okay there. There was a problem there, so that you would not be expelled or reassigned, but then again if you were a union man or not did not play such a big role."
"I heard about God only about around twenty-one years old, when I was studying scientific atheism for a year and they were explaining to me that something does not exist and that it must be scientifically proven. And so I told them: 'If it does not exist, why must one scientifically prove it?' Because I had not heard about it for twenty years, because the nearest church, which was somewhat functional, was eight kilometres on foot somewhere. And so I did not know about it. People went, as this sort of half-recess and punk, to midnight masses. But that was like a show, where a party set out, which was a little anti-state and provocation, but it did not have anything to do with God Our Lord. It was a show. And so until twenty-one I was untouched, and actually one of the key parts was those studies, which lead me to faith or to God."
Karel Šimon Hlavatý was born on the 4th of June 1958 in Turnov, but he experienced his childhood near the castle of Sychrov in the municipality of Radimovice. In childhood and adolescence he was strongly influenced by his family circumstances - both of his parents, Karel and Jaroslava, were convinced communists and so was the rest of their extended family. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies in the year 1968 his father was expelled from the party for his passivity and despite dying two years following this, his son had problems getting into a grammar school and later to the Pedagogical Faculty of Univerzita Jana Evangelisty Purkyně in Ústí nad Labem. However, both of them successfully finished their studies. Karel Šimon Hlavatý became the head of the local youth organization SSM, under their header he organized underground concerts of the band Sychrovští pavouci, which he founded, and where he played percussion. During his studies at the Turnov grammar school he was enchanted by poetry. He began reading it, writing it, and also publishing in the poetic section of the magazine Mladý svět [Young World]. When at university he was listening to a lecture about scientific atheism, he realized the absurdity of the existence of God, which this subject attempted to deny. At the same time he began to get involved in the cultural underground. He met with the liberal dissent, in Prague he attended several illegal events and also the Egon Bondy. His true initiation experience for him was a meeting with the later archbishop and political prisoner of the 50s Karel Otčenášek, who brought him to get baptized. Karel Šimon Hlavatý at the beginning of the 80s on the basis of his own decision stepped out of SSM and actively participated in the underground. He befriended Marek Skolil, who was later an emigrant, and colleague Pavel Tigrid in Paris, who also published a collection of verses in samizdat. Due to ideological problems they reassigned him from Žibřidice, where he taught in small classes, to a school in Radostín, where he was supposed to be under the supervision of the principal - an ardent communist, who bullied him all the way to the Velvet Revolution in the year 1989. Karel Šimon Hlavatý at the beginning of the 90s decided to switch to the profession of carousel proprietor and rode away with the caravan to Poland, where he worked like this for two years. After his return he switched through several professions, so that in the year 2005 he would settle down as sworn monk - a Dominican. Karel Šimon Hlavatý lived in the Dominican monastery in Jablonný in Podještědí.
