Czapski

 Excerpts from Jozef Czapski’s diaries encountered once again in the journal Zeszyty literackie. As always, a tremendous sense of sincerity and passion. Enthusiasm came easily to Czapski, so did tears in his final years, and perhaps this is why he’s so hard on himself, always making sure that he’s not just being naive, that he’s not moved too easily, he subjects his reactions to a reality check: Can they be sustained? I remember what Karol Irzykowski once said, “Who needs the sincerity of fools?” But in Czapski’s case, sincerity reveals a wise, internally complex individual, always striving for spiritual wholeness, for strong vision, for “grace,” a necessarily short-lived moment of illumination. Czapski, a reader of classic diaries kept by the great introverts, Amiel or Maine de Biran, records in his notebooks his efforts, constantly renewed, to attain inner wholeness. Someone interested only in the visible, obvious things that can be fully expressed in political or social reality will dismiss such narratives of inner states as useless narcissism. The conflict between Czapski and Jerzy Giedroyc was classic. The editor of the journal Kultura was impassioned only by the behavioral language of political action; he even viewed Milosz’s poems chiefly as a key tool in his strategic instrumentarium. The sui generis Machiavelli of helpless emigrants, Giedroyc lacked any real-world power in his role as the editor of a journal read by exiles scattered across the globe. But in his own imagination, he was a great statesman. And in fact he was a statesman; or at least he became one a posteriori, in the memories of younger generations, thanks to his astute assessments of the political situation, and also because he viewed his fellow countrymen so critically. He dismissed Czapski’s inner worlds (he once said that he published Simone Weil’s writings “for Catholic snobs”). What use is introspection in a brutal reality? This is precisely that world divided between behaviorists and dreamers. Those readers who like the figure of Hans Castorp in Magic Mountain, Hans, who called his hours of intensive reading, his moments of rich reflection or just fantasizing, absorbed in real questions, “dominion” (Juliusz Slowacki had a different word for it, he called it “byronization”)—it’s one of the best definitions of the contours of spiritual life—these readers will understand perfectly what Czapski meant and why his notes are indispensable. True, as we were reading Mann’s novel, one of my students in Chicago remarked acidly of Castorp, “So what, he develops spiritually, but what does he do with it?” The crowning moment of his career involves after all collecting records for the sanatorium patients to listen to (or that he dies on the front, one of the anonymous young men sucked into the muck of Verdun). But this was a classic expression of American pragmatism.

Czapski sometimes speaks of himself—but always in terms of the ceaseless battle he wages for clear vision, for full use of his gifts, the battle to imbue his life with maximal meaning. He frequently talks in his diaries with Simone Weil, whom he admired boundlessly and who tormented him with the perfection and extremity of her religious contemplation, and also with her masterly prose. Here’s an excerpt of his diary from 1970—including a citation from one of the great mystic’s letters to Maurice Schumann:

“January 13—Tuesday. And the same thing for heaven knows how many times: I wake up muddled and open S.W. ‘ceaselessly and increasingly torn, both in my intelligence and in the depth of my heart, through my inability to conceive simultaneously and in truth of the affliction of men, the perfection of God and the link between the two.

‘I have an inward conviction that if the vision of this truth is ever vouchsafed to me it will only be when I myself am psychically in affliction, and in one of the extreme forms of the present affliction.

‘I am afraid that this will not happen. Even when I was a child and thought that I was an atheist and a materialist, the fear was always present to me that I should fail, not over my life but over my death. This fear has never ceased to grow in intensity.

‘An unbeliever might say that my desire is egotistical because the vision of truth, received at such a moment, can no longer be of any use to anyone.

‘But a Christian cannot think in this way. A Christian knows that a single thought of love raised to God in truth, although mute and without an echo, is more useful, even for this world, than the most brilliant action.’”

[Translation fromSimone Weil as We Knew Her, Joseph-Marie Perrin]

How can you be a painter, a writer, in the face of such a voracious longing for God and suffering? How do you give yourself to any meditation that does not race immediately to the highest goal, that makes do—whether through laziness, cowardice, or tepidity, or perhaps simply because of other aspirations or abilities—with halfway points, that clings to the outskirts? It’s as if a wanderer spent whole days ambling through alpine foothills while the highest peaks, with their magnetically white snows, gaze down on him with contempt, even condemnation. Simone Weil tortured Czapski, and she still tortures us. Czapski labored over each canvas, “sawed away” at it, tried to stay true to the initial vision, which faded, grew distant. He painted with difficulty, was rarely satisfied with what he’d done. For him Simone Weil was like a jet pilot compared to a bicyclist. And not just for Czapski. What’s to be done? Nothing can be done. You can try, but in principle it can’t be done. Perhaps it’s like this: In books for the youngest pupils you sometimes find pictures of people on their way somewhere, pedestrians and bicyclists; a hay-rack cart brimming with scented hay rumbles by, a swift auto flashes past, a train runs farther off, through the windows of its sky-blue cars you can see the passengers’ smiling, carefree faces, a little airplane flies overhead. They’re all in motion, all en route. They’re en route, but also motionless. And if you examine the picture carefully day after day, week after week, month after month, even year after year, no one vehicle outpaces the others … The plane is still in the same spot, the travelers still scrutinize the spring landscape, the pedestrian still heads unhurriedly for parts unknown, the tall trees still rise unmoved, a stork stands in the meadow.

Zagajewski

From: Slight Exaggeration