Master Henryk Elzenberg

TO HENRYK ELZENBERG ON THE CENTENNIAL OF HIS BIRTH

What would have become of me had I not met you—Master Henryk

whom I address for the first time by your first name

With the reverence and respect due to—Tall Shades
I’d have been a silly boy to the end of my life

Searching

Stifled tacitum ashamed of my own existence
An unknowing boy
The times we lived in were truly a tale told by an idiot

Full of sound and cruelty

Your severe gentleness delicate strength

Taught me to weather the world like a thinking stone

Patient indifferent and tender all at once
You were surrounded by sophists and those who think with a hammer

Dialectical frauds parishioners of nothingness—you looked at them

Through spectacles slightly streaked with tears
With an eye that forgives and shouldn’t forgive
All my life I failed to wring from myself a word of thanksgiving

On your deathbed—I’m told—you waited for the voice of a pupil

Who in the city of fake lights on the Seine

was being finished off by cruel nursemaids
But the Law Tablets Brotherhood—endure
Praise be to your forefathers

To those few who loved you
Praise be to your Books

Slender
Spacious

More lasting than bronze
Praise be to your cradle

Zbigniew Herbert
**
One photograph in the Witkacy exhibit shows a man in a pilot’s cap, inscribed Elzenberg, aviator. This must be Henryk Elzenberg, the philosopher, whose place in literary history is due chiefly to his role as Zbigniew Herbert’s friend and teacher. He wasn’t permitted to teach much in the Stalinist years, but a circle of students, including the young Herbert, surrounded him just the same. He wrote many works studied by specialists; but the greatest of them are his intellectual diaries, which were published under the title The Trouble with Existence in the late 1960s; they’ve lost nothing of their power today. It’s an exceptional book. Elzenberg was influenced by a range of traditions: nineteenth-century historicism, Eastern philosophy, he found masters from Goethe to Gandhi. In The Trouble with Existence, he reveals an encompassing intellect, unprotected by any kind of philosophical armor. Just the opposite: these are the notes of a defenseless man, who spent fifty years scrupulously recording his observations, his doubts, he comments on his rich, wide-ranging readings, reacts to historical events. He engages with the classic questions of the philosophy of culture, but also with dilemmas less frequently encountered in the history of systematic thought. One such problem is the link between poetry and life: Does a person preoccupied by poetry, imagination, inevitably stand at a remove from life?… Elzenberg doesn’t have a clear answer to the question, he struggles with it constantly, coming down on the side of life one time, and defending the imagination the next. During the First World War, he comments that poetry has won in the debate with life, since the drama of war has shown what life can be in its “amplitude, richness, tragedy, splendor.” But this observation comes early on, when the terrors of trench warfare hadn’t yet been disclosed. During the Second World War, while living in hell (since Nazi-occupied Poland was hell), he continues his reading, the patient recording of his thoughts. He never doubted the value of contemplating art, of ideas and literature, and this at a time when other writers and thinkers, stunned by the war’s catastrophes, the Holocaust, spurned the entire history of European culture, choosing nihilism instead—like offended children. He managed to keep his intellectual independence amid brutal historical realities; he continued to comment on his reading as the Battle of Stalingrad raged. He didn’t construct a philosophical system, he didn’t advance a single “central metaphor,” he never entered the pantheon of great philosophers—but he left behind a book whose greatest virtue is its “softness,” its rejection of final conclusions, its ongoing, daily reckoning with the world. In Elzenberg’s diaries, it’s as if each night erased his earlier meditations and opened all his doubts anew—is this the philosopher’s defeat? He started fresh each day, as if he didn’t allow himself to read the earlier entries, as if he had to address the fundamental questions ab ovo. Is this defeat or triumph? Does he simply equivocate, is he incapable of taking a clear-cut position, staking his claim, and energetically defending his territory? I’ll admit, sometimes his endless questing does bother me. At other times, though, I’m convinced that he won a great victory, precisely because he achieved two things: he didn’t find the answers, but he never forgot the questions. (...)

If I could write novels, I might try to write a book about a man who wants to live his life only in brief, intense moments of mystical revelation, while neglecting everything that happens predictably in endlessly repetitive days and weeks, he views those days and weeks as insufferable drudgery, as the dreary cotton wool with which life is stuffed, in which, so my hero would think, things happen only for banal, dramaturgical reasons—since we can’t live exclusively in moments, after all, Darwin would never permit it. The man wouldn’t necessarily have to be a practicing artist, a thinker, he might simply confine himself to intense experiences. He might also make notes, hoping that they would one day lead to his Hauptwerk (Witkacy’s term). His philosophy proves its worth, such as it is, only in times of relative peace, but then war breaks out, ominous SS uniforms appear, or the only slightly less ominous uniforms of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. And our mystic finds himself caught in a trap. He’s being destroyed by the monstrous, primitive machine of modern history, which disdains even the subtler approaches to time measured in days and weeks, not to mention those ecstatic seconds. Henryk Elzenberg, who knew and admired Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, would be a prime candidate for the novel’s hero. In some ways he lived through aphorisms, in aphorisms, and not in the systematic continuity of events. In 1938 he commented in his diary, “War draws closer and closer, it will erupt any day, without warning. We must be mentally prepared. It will reach deeper into life than the last war. It will undermine everything, destroy the ground beneath our feet. It won’t leave us the kind of peace that the earlier war did; you could still fall in love, argue, make up, write articles on philosophy, present them at the Academy, get a fellowship to Vienna and spend weeks on end looking at paintings in galleries and reading books about Rembrandt … For those who’ve staked their cards on thought, on art, this may be the end—literally.” (...)

I don’t know much about Elzenberg’s life under Nazi occupation. I know only that he managed to survive. And I know that he lived in Vilnius then, that he taught secretly, that he got by on temporary jobs, he worked, for example, as the night watchman in a carpentry factory. This struck me as a revelation: the thinker as night watchman, a watchman with a meditative disposition, who likes contemplating the night sky. As Elzenberg himself once remarked, every writer faces a choice: Should he tell the stars about his generation, or tell his generation about the stars?… During his stint as a night watchman, he could talk with the stars at his leisure. He certainly didn’t travel to Vienna, didn’t linger before the paintings of old masters. But he survived. And in spite of all, he didn’t abandon his beloved diary, in which he stubbornly, systematically, perhaps not daily, but regularly, composed his endless letter to us, to coming generations. So he couldn’t actually serve as my novel’s hero—the war didn’t shatter him, Stalinism didn’t crush him.

It might even seem, for all my unwritten novel’s early premises, that his aphoristic way of life permitted his survival, or at least abetted it, that the indispensable drop of nonchalance shaping this man who lived in moments increased his chance of survival in a time of mass repression, tremendous danger … It’s as if someone chasing butterflies had missed a mass arrest by accident or luck, since he’s been following the insects’ chaotic flight, which is nothing like his persecutors’ harsh, monotonous march.

But chance destroyed many other aesthetes and mystics (it can be hard to tell them apart); they blundered, lost in thought, they walked into a roundup, they stopped by a friend’s place, where a trap lay waiting, an SS officer was having a bad day and didn’t like their looks on some Lvov or Warsaw street. And their chance of escape was near zero if they were Jews.

Elzenberg, who came from an assimilated Jewish family, survived the war only to fall prey to the next ideological system; he became a subject of the Soviet empire. Yet even then, in those dark years, he found friends and students, among them the puckish young poet Zbigniew Herbert. Elzenberg wasn’t allowed to teach from 1950 on, thanks to his “incorrigible idealism” (as Wikipedia puts it). He lived to see 1956, though, and the relaxed restrictions on scholarly and intellectual pursuits. He died at the age of eighty, in 1967, having witnessed the success of his greatest publication, the work that gathered and preserved so masterfully the fruits of so many moments of meditation. No, I won’t write a novel about him.

From:

Adam Zagajewski
Slight Exaggeration