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 

Cioran Notebooks

 A moralist is someone who appeals to the better side of human nature, an orator mindful of the primary choice between good and evil, someone who reminds us of our basic obligations and condemns our failings and mistakes. It’s a person who speaks like an angel. So at any rate—perhaps rather naively—we’re accustomed to thinking in Poland. In France, though, a moralist is a writer who speaks ill of others. The best moralist is he who hits hardest. This worthy tradition was born under the sign of La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort (and the greatest of them all, Pascal!); it is a tradition of malicious mockery that conceals a rarely expressed maximalist ideal of humanity with religious overtones. In the twentieth century it found a successor who didn’t resemble his venerable progenitors in the slightest (it’s true that Cioran notes with satisfaction that Prince La Rochefoucauld was a timid person by nature). This was a poor immigrant from Romania, an Orthodox priest’s son, a typical Central European intellectual in some respects, one of those scribes nesting in Parisian attics whose source of livelihood and precise origins are unknown; is he from Budapest or Bucharest? (The Parisians never ask in any case, since they couldn’t care less.)

An unusual book appeared in France in November of this year—the posthumously published diaries of Emil Cioran, entitled Cahiers, that is, Notebooks, which were prepared for publication by the writer’s longtime companion, Simone Boué (herself no longer living). The book caused a sensation for a simple reason. Cioran, the famed author of fascinating philosophical essays, bleak, exceptionally pessimistic works translated into many languages and grounded in the principle that “only he who was never born is happy,” suddenly produces what may well be his greatest book two years after his death (his dates are 1911–1995). It doesn’t precisely contradict his earlier work; still it serves as a kind of corrective, it supplements the earlier writings in fascinating ways. Cioran emerges here as a religious thinker, a personality richer than his previous essays had suggested. The earlier essays called to mind a scrupulously pruned French garden, while the diary reveals at times a different person, less consistent than he’d seemed earlier, a different, more complex philosopher, even at times a poet.

The Notebooks—they span the years 1957–72, so they don’t go all the way to the end—were published, like Kafka’s work, against the wishes of the author, who didn’t want his private notes made public (although he didn’t burn them! In our times you can’t rely on others, you have to destroy your manuscripts yourself). The book is uncommonly irritating—as it should be, a personal diary that doesn’t bother anyone has clearly been falsified. Cioran irritates us with his extreme narcissism (the book contains at least two hundred self-definitions), his ill humor, his hypochondria, his radical misanthropy: he experiences a shock of revulsion at the sight of common humanity each time he happens to enter a subway car or suburban train. This narcissism distinguishes him from La Rochefoucauld, who never wrote about himself.

He irritates us both with the obsessions themselves and with the conviction, articulated on more than one occasion, that great art is born only of obsessions. He arouses impatience, aggravation, and pity—but also admiration for the courage with which he reveals his own failings. But he doesn’t stop there; after all, that’s not so extraordinary, young American poets do little else in their flawed poems. In his diaries he constructs a brilliant philosophical treatise written in installments and filled with wrenching contradictions, the confession of a woeful, gifted child of his century.

Who was Cioran? He was born in a Romanian village, which he affectionately remembered as a lost paradise to the end of his life. The son, as I mentioned, of a provincial priest, he was extraordinarily talented and began publishing early on. He was also afflicted early on by his maniacally intense spiritual life, by various neurasthenias and by his greatest foe, an ominous monster called insomnia. (Or rather, Insomnia; this complaint, to which Cioran sometimes ascribes philosophical virtues, was to plague him for years to come.) He settled in France before the war, but only in the immediate postwar years did he begin writing in French (he had already written and published several books in Romanian). He soon won the reputation as one of the best stylists in French literature, although he retained his Romanian accent in speaking. A perfectionist, Cioran never spoke on French television or radio; he doubtless couldn’t tolerate the thought that the flawless stylist might mangle the spoken language by mispronouncing all the French variants of the vowel e.His fascist episode, a period of genuine enthusiasm for the Romanian Iron Guard, casts a shadow on his biography (in his diaries he notes that “my affirmations only add to my troubles, my negations are received enthusiastically”).

He developed an uncanny knack for attracting paradoxical living conditions to his apartment in the very heart of Paris (21, rue de l’Odéon). He never prospered and lived very modestly to the end (although in his diary of the sixties he notes with something like astonishment that he now owns five or six suits!). He didn’t accept literary honors; in his diary he notes that it doesn’t befit Job, after all, to receive literary awards … He was considered a recluse, an ascetic, and so he was, up to a point. At the same time, though, he led an exceptionally active “Parisian” social life and knew “all Paris” (le tout-Paris). He was at times considered “fashionable”; he became a specialist in suicide … He befriended Beckett (if two such eccentrics could really be friends), Ionesco, Henri Michaux, he knew Celan. Whom didn’t he know!

He attended Parisian parties (and reproached himself bitterly the morning after); when he came across friends, he could talk for hours on end without letting anyone else get a word in edgewise. But how he suffered afterward on that account! He loathed Parisian hypocrisy, the Parisian literary industry, Parisian snobbery—and at the same time he took to it all like a duck takes to water. Once, after visiting an exhibit of Jozef Czapski’s work (he knew him too, and, I think, admired him in his way), he wrote that the people at the show smiled not hypocritically, but sincerely, since they were Poles, not Frenchmen.

His diary is a hymn in praise of solitude and silence; the great conversationalist Cioran loved only quiet. For all that, you have to admire the diary’s honesty. Cioran frequently speaks badly of himself: he doesn’t pass over his countless minor treacheries in silence, he mocks himself, the failed Buddhist halted halfway on the road to mysticism, the disciple of Tao who knows half of Paris. But he betrayed only himself, only his cherished self-image. He longed to be an Asian sage despising the minor matters of this world while making his way toward Nirvana or what the Stoics called ataraxia—but he was forever wrangling with rude barbers, pushy shopgirls, dilatory cashiers, and finally, with himself. He had a litigious nature but was drawn to the Stoic—or Buddhist—ideal of passivity and inner calm.

He likewise dreamed of achieving complete indifference to the fate of his own books. More than this—he dreamed of giving up writing completely and reaching maximal happiness and satisfaction through absolute passivity and intentionally aimless meditation. Nonetheless he would call his publisher to remind him to stock his books in Parisian bookstores, and he suffered when an American editor rejected his essay on Paul Valéry, just as any other writer would in his place. Cioran didn’t want to be who he was; he didn’t want to be Romanian, or a writer, or a crank. Above all, he was revolted by the Parisian man of letters he’d become!

He never abandoned the dream of being “the hangman’s son” with which he used to shock his friends. At the same time, though, he led the thoroughly correct life of a bourgeois intellectual. He wanted to be demonically other, but without effort (he didn’t wish to torture himself, or others, like de Sade or Artaud). He would have preferred to inherit infamy from his parents the way others inherit the color of their eyes. Other people dream of receiving a fortune, he longed for a family disgrace.

He admired Simone Weil and they shared a certain secret similarity; both were drawn to “decreation,” that is, the dissolution of—their own—existence. Suicide was Cioran’s greatest philosophical obsession. At times he dealt with it pragmatically and wrote that those who think about killing themselves never actually do it. Opposites in so many respects—the selfish, lazy (in the Eastern style) Cioran versus Weil the tireless activist serving the oppressed—both saw themselves as hampering God.

“My son would undoubtably be a murderer,” the childless Cioran commented. But he also told a friend who was soon to become a father that he was taking a monstrous risk: “Your son may become a murderer.” The continuation of life on earth struck him as insanity, and each new pregnancy was a mistake.

“I go to my Doubt each day the way other people go to the office,” he wrote once in his diary. Diary writing stands under the sign of Doubt, written—in this passage—with a capital letter. The great prompter of doubt is death. Why—why should I do this or that, think this or that, say this or that, when death will come inevitably? Friends’ funerals were torture for Cioran; a cremation at Père Lachaise acts on him more forcibly than all his readings of ancient skeptics and cynics. Yet sometimes there’s a certain majesty in this as well; even an insignificant neighbor whose loud radio had bothered the writer for years undergoes an exceptional metamorphosis in death. Thus we discover the baroque Cioran, who lives constantly with the thought of death; and insomnia stands revealed as death’s cousin, its emissary.

The official world, both political and academic, has been infected by lies; truth lives only in doubt, in opposition, in solitude, in an anarchistic relationship to life. It’s not difficult to discern in this a trace of the writer’s very private resentment. His early, misguided support of Romanian fascism (a ghastly mistake committed by so many prominent Romanian intellectuals, not just by Cioran) surely led him to shun any form of affirmation. Once bitten … To interpret Cioran this way—and it’s an easy reading, a little obvious, too easy—deprives him of much of his dark charm, reduces him automatically to “one of many” intellectuals.

But Cioran’s drama can be interpreted differently, more individually, as the record of a single, distinctive soul; the story of his love for poetry forms one thread in this thousand-page book. In a nutshell—it is the story of poetry slowly being strangled by skepticism, by doubt. Cioran has his favorite poets: Dickinson, Shelley, Dowson. But he turns to them ever more rarely, grows ever further from poetry. He can’t bear Rilke’s letters, and prefers the cynicism in some of Gottfried Benn’s letters. Poetry’s rival is bitter, mocking, illusionless prose. The only poet who speaks to him in the end is Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach’s music always astounds him, commands him to cross to the other side, the side of joy, affirmation, and God (only Handel’s Messiah has a comparable effect). But just for a moment.

In the diary, Cioran becomes exceptionally laconic whenever moments of poetry appear—as signaled by music or long walks in the lonely landscapes of the French countryside. Doubt, on the other hand, is eloquent; urged on by the author’s voice, Doubt’s pronouncements cut the way Spinoza cut lenses. Cioran’s diary is essentially a platform designed for Doubt’s benefit. In the diary, poetry leads a marginal, almost conspiratorial existence; it dwindles and fades. But even its modest presence lends Cioran’s posthumously published book the charm of novelty, since precisely this love affair with poetry and music permits us to revise our earlier portrait, derived from the essays, of the Parisian misanthrope.

Adam Zagajewski

 A Defense of Ardor

Paul Claudel

 Paul Claudel is largely forgotten today, even in France. Admirers of his sister Camille remember him and sometimes blame her brother for his supposed persecution of the unfortunate sculptress. Occasionally someone will stage one of his plays. But his work as a whole, the deep breath of his poetry, the strength of his intellect, his essays, don’t stir much interest these days, they probably seem too solid, too monumental, they lack fear and doubt, they’re anachronistic. The certainty of his convictions seems compromising, old-fashioned. In his famous elegy for Yeats—Claudel probably makes an appearance just for the sake of the rhyme Claudel and well—Auden admits that the French poet was a good writer, but suggests that he must first be forgiven (presumably for some political transgression, probably his support, purely theoretical, of Franco in the Spanish Civil War) before we can actually enjoy his work. During the Second World War, Claudel, by then a retired ambassador living in the Castle of Brangues—briefly sided with Pétain and even wrote an ode in his honor (a small ode, as opposed to his five great odes), but Claudel soon grew disillusioned with the Vichy regime. Shocked by the tragedy of the Jews, he sent a courageous letter to the chief rabbi of France in December 1941, in which he stood up for the oppressed. It’s true that he had another, less attractive side, the hateful Claudel, the inquisitor—though he never actually performed such a function—who thought that all Protestants would roast in hell simply because they were Protestants. He didn’t like Germans, the sight of that country’s citizens consuming grilled sausages and drinking beer filled him with true Gallic loathing. But he counted himself among the admirers of Poland, Catholic Poland. He doesn’t seem to have been personally appealing; Iwaszkiewicz valued and translated his work, but on their first meeting, he was struck by Claudel’s artificiality. Iwaszkiewicz uses the French word facticité (Paul Valéry gave him the same impression). None of this helps us to gain entry into the writing. Claudel’s nature: He was quick to damn, to reject, and to despise; he despised Eliot, despised Rilke, and also, bearing in mind his many aversions, he seems almost physically repulsive as seen in photos, too bulky, no neck, a short, stocky man hewn from a single block of wood, a perpetually unsmiling bourgeois clad in an ambassador’s uniform embroidered with braids. After the Second World War, this humorless playwright and poet was crammed, doubtless with some difficulty, into a different uniform, that of a French Academician, likewise embroidered and accompanied by a sword, purely symbolic in principle, but in the case of this choleric Academician, one might theoretically imagine it landing actual blows—on Protestants, for example. However, anyone who looks through his great odes, Cinq grandes odes, without prejudice, or excerpts from the plays, for example the scene on ship deck in Partage de midi, will instantly fall under the spell of the poetic enchanter who hid in daily life beneath uniforms and braids. Claudel’s diary, the Journal in the two-volume Pléiade edition, is also marvelous, a great prose poem where over several hundred necessarily uneven pages, dull quotations from Latin theological texts alternate with radiant poetic observations, fruits of the purest inspiration.

Adam Zagajewski

Slight Exaggeration 

Tadzio & Death in Venice

 In the Krakow English-language bookstore Massolit I recently happened on a little book describing the life of the Polish boy who’d inspired the beautiful Tadzio in Thomas Mann’s famous novella Death in Venice. The book’s author, Gilbert Adair, an American from New York, went to great lengths tracking down the fate of this boy. Adair discovered, among other things, that the same boy, at an even earlier age—he was only six—had made a great impression on Henryk Sienkiewicz! It’s long been known that the boy was the model for Mann’s character, that Mann actually encountered an aristocratic Polish family in Venice and succumbed to “Tadzio’s” great charm—he fell in love, although, as his biographers stress, this was, as always for Mann, a cautious, purely platonic fascination; he made no effort to meet the hero of his future book. The boy’s identity first came to light in the 1960s. His name was Wladyslaw, not Tadeusz, but his family called him Adzio, hence the name the German writer gave him. Wladyslaw Moes was a baron, an authentic baron (unlike the Parisian prefect Haussmann, who just liked the title), and spent the first half of his long life in luxury. There was nothing of the artist, the intellectual, about him. He liked horses, races, elegant attire, balls, parties, cards. He was, in short, the ideal incarnation of an aristocrat in the more vulgar version favored by writers of popular fiction—sometimes, as it turns out, they’re right. He apparently had no interest in bona fide “high” literature, he didn’t quest after “metaphysical feelings,” politics likewise held no interest; he lived in another world, the world of careless pleasure. He knew, though; he discovered much later that he’d been the model for the beautiful boy in Death in Venice. More precisely, he didn’t seek it out; rather, the news reached him, since I doubt he actually ever tried to discover anything about himself, about himself in Venice, in the hotel on the Lido, where he must have felt the fixed, watchful gaze of that short, middle-aged gentleman, an elegant member of the German bourgeoisie. He doubtlessly felt flattered once the information finally reached him. He was an ordinary man, what the French call un homme moyen sensuel, who suddenly found that he contained mythic potential. He must have stood long before the mirror, seeking to find traces of that mythic being in his face, without success …

Later, much later, when articles revealing his name began to appear in the European press, when he’d been found out, his true identity had been deciphered, he tried to file a lawsuit defending his privacy—as if his anemic privacy required defending, as if the relative immortality offered by Mann might in any way threaten his fragile dignity. After the war he lost everything he possessed, he scraped by on a humble translator’s earnings; only his knowledge of languages, his French, now betrayed his better days. It was in short a difficult existence, not tragic, but sad—through a distant observer’s eyes, it might seem that the vacation on the Lido had been the high point of his life … and not just because it has been preserved in world literature. Later, in 1971, Visconti shot his film, with its obsessive repetition of the “Adagio” from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and a beautiful Swedish boy playing the role of the young Pole. Photos of the actual boy from the time of his Venetian vacation also began to appear—which must have vexed the aging Wladyslaw Moes if he saw them, and if he still cared about the legend of his early years, since they came accompanied by malicious comments: he hadn’t been so good-looking after all, the young Swedish actor beat him hands down … But did early twentieth-century photographs tell the truth about human faces? (I’m taking up the baron’s defense.) It must have been painful: they wanted to destroy his last remaining treasure, the legend of his beauty, his charm … But something else struck me even more—“Tadzio” had spent the Second World War in a German Oflag, a POW camp for officers. “Tadzio” as a German POW! We have to imagine this man, the former ephebe of Mann’s novella, a rather dissolute aristocrat, in a German prison camp. Yet another encounter with Germans, different this time, plebeians, speaking a debased language in which the word heard most frequently was the monosyllabic Raus. I also imagine the unchanging routines of camp existence: rutabaga soup, mess tins, dingy darned sheets, the rare letter from home, dreary coexistence with the same companions in misfortune, seen, and thus perhaps loathed, daily, frost, snow, heat, the four seasons circling monotonously around the barracks like a flock of vultures, the lack of privacy, not a single moment to step aside, to hide. Horse races, banquets, elegant outfits, smoking jackets—forgotten, unreal. And even earlier, the luminous Lido, games on the beach, a brief moment of happiness we know only by chance, thanks to the gaze and gifts of Thomas Mann.

As we know, Mann spent the war years in California and had of course long ceased to think about “Tadzio”; that episode now belonged to history, to philology. Decades later Tadzio had become a literary character, something along the lines of Tonio Krüger, Clavdia Chauchat, or Little Mr. Friedeman—all of whom existed, however, exclusively on paper, unlike the man who had inspired Tadzio. The famous novelist continued to encounter other handsome boys, to observe them carefully, and to record these meetings, never leading to any kind of intimacy, in his pedantic diary. And “Tadzio”? He survived the war, left the camp for home, but this home had been confiscated by the Communists. Only poverty remained, a gray quotidian, chasing after a job in one of the Western embassies in Warsaw, since they remained islands of another world, tolerated by the odd types from the Central Committee, uneducated people with square skulls who filled the blank spaces in Marx’s utopia (the underdefined spaces, as the Krakow philosopher Roman Ingarden would say). Finally, near the end, illness, stays in sanatoriums, hospitals, packed wards (like the camp barracks), and the last day, death, about which we know nothing, so we can’t say if it suddenly lit up the life with a glow even brighter than the Lido, or if it simply carelessly snuffed the flame of an already dim candle before heading off to the next patient.

**

But once more on Tadzio—that is, on someone who borrowed several traits from our acquaintance Wladyslaw Moes, that unfortunate baron—the hero of Death in Venice, a novella that still radically divides its readers into two camps, the ardent admirers and passionate opponents of Thomas Mann. The story’s style may be a bit baroque at times (the rhythm of the hexameter surfaces in the German original, alongside allusions to Plato…). But what it presents, the history of a famous writer who falls deliriously in love with a slender boy, so deeply in love that the refined intellectual abandons his art, his all-engrossing literary and spiritual labors, his lifelong quest for truth and form, only to perish in poverty, to die as a homeless pauper, a nameless beggar, might, to die like a pet cast off by its owners, like a worm—it could happen anytime, anyplace, to anyone (almost anyone). Gustav von Aschenbach, the renowned author, a specialist in the human heart, in European history, who clearly feels most at home in the silence of his study, someone who lovingly caresses his books, who is intoxicated by ideas, his own and others’, who lives by thinking, by writing, writing rocks him, bears him through the decades as the ocean carries a sailing ship, suddenly, from the moment he sees that beautiful boy, he loses his mind completely, and the capacious world of intellectual discipline that had hitherto offered him daily refuge and inspiration loses all its charm. In the space of a few days this seemingly weighty edifice of education and creation, intellect and inspiration, risk and dignity, vanishes, sinks into oblivion; its place is taken by chasing Tadzio, watching him from a safe distance, observing his routines, his walks, his runs along the beach, his games with other boys, the impatient waiting until he appears again, first in the hotel restaurant, surrounded by family, then later on the sands of the Lido, where the famous author sits in his cozy, shaded beach chair, trying to write, all the while keeping an eye out for the boy, for Tadzio, he has to watch him, and gradually losing interest in what he tries to write. Aschenbach meets with great misfortune: he falls in love. He falls hopelessly in love with a young creature, a creature possessing the charm of youth, a boy whose life he cannot share in any respectable fashion, and he thus goes insane and dies shortly thereafter. And what becomes of the countless virtues and pleasures of intellectual labor, the careful, fruitful reading on winter days with the white city drowsing outside the window and logs crackling in the fireplace, jotting down thoughts with a fountain pen on clean sheets of paper, above all, that sweet moment when a new idea appears, when new notions emerge out of nowhere, a new take on a topic you’ve been contemplating for ages, when it suddenly assumes new shape, generates new energy, a moment of rapture expands, extends to several hours, fuses with a rhythm of smooth but enthusiastic work? No one knows where they go, those moments, where they’ve vanished, since they’ve been forgotten, they’re ridiculous in comparison with the sole force now governing the fifty-year-old Aschenbach, the wild passion, the pursuit of the beautiful boy even though this boy embodies no ideas, has read next to nothing, doesn’t know Plato, couldn’t possibly hold his own in a conversation about Greek tragedies or the crisis brought on by scientific progress and the triumph of positivism in the last part of the nineteenth century, or the attempts to surmount this crisis mustered by Bergson and other thinkers and artists driven to despair by the barren world of science. One smile from this ephebe holds more meaning than all of Rembrandt’s paintings, Keats’s poems, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Mozart’s piano concertos, Shakespeare’s plays, Goya’s Caprichos. When he runs along the beach, only this matters, that he runs along the beach, with his slim, sunbathed body bent so as to form a right angle with the earth’s surface, and only this is precious, splendid, both fragile and final, unique. This slim body is more important that libraries and museums, concerts in which pianists labor so mightily to stir the impressionable souls of their listeners. And why must Aschenbach, honored and esteemed not just in his native land, but throughout Europe, laden with so many awards and honors—but where are they now, those honors and awards?—why must he perish, perish like the homeless of great cities, swiftly buried in anonymous graves so as not to disrupt the pleasures of the self-satisfied bourgeois? He, who has over the years made his name a synonym for great intelligence, a symbol of wisdom, sees this name erode gradually, day by day, it contracts, diminishes, and vanishes in the same abyss into which all his awards, his glowing reviews, congratulatory letters, and honorary degrees had already tumbled with a gentle splash. And he knows—or rather senses, since he doesn’t know much anymore—that he must die, there’s no other choice, since nothing ties him to that boy, not the slightest hope, and yet he can’t live without Tadzio, without seeing him. Moreover, the Polish family fears the epidemic that everyone is talking about, they’re leaving, taking the lovely boy with them (he’ll vaguely remember some older gentlemen gazing at him intently), so the great writer has only one way out, if you can call it that, to perish, vanish, die. And thus his great misfortune draws to a close, his disaster evaporates like the shallow puddle left by a brief shower on a sultry day, his pain dissipates; his name will be resurrected briefly to ornament a few European papers, the news of the literary titan’s death will shock readers (shock them, but also, truth be told, rather please them, a diverting story to accompany their morning coffee, they’ll feel a bit better, at least something’s happened, sad, of course, but interesting, too). But then his name will be like a dead butterfly, dried in the sun, a blind moth, like a fly lying supine on a windowsill, its tiny legs folded as if in prayer.

*   *   *

On the other hand, the story’s author, Mann himself, experienced the same thing—or not precisely the same thing, but close—as Aschenbach and emerged from this crisis unscathed, he kept his head. He suffered, to be sure, but unlike the writer who became the novella’s hero and martyr, he had an extraordinarily strong sense of decorum, he could never have fallen as low as his hero. Moreover, he was staying in that elegant hotel with his wife, not alone, so he could watch his ephebe only surreptitiously, on the sly, he had to act out a comedy, keeping secrets from his wife. But something else really saved him; he was saved by writing, that odd activity that sometimes turns pain into pleasure, a chemical process that takes suffering and transforms it into black marks on a page.

From: Slight Exaggeration

by Adam Zagajewski 

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