In a 2009 interview with a publication in Barcelona, Spain, Adam Zagajewski is asked a question about political correctness, euphemisms and other debasements of language. He replies: “There is the harsher side of existence -- disease and death -- and the loftier reasons for poetry. In all writing, there is a clear tension between the ‘higher’ world, so to speak, and everyday life. The former is part of the world of dreams and ideals, while the latter describes the more terrible or laughable aspects of the human condition. If you keep to one side or the other, you'll be called a hypocrite.” Poets are not the only ones dealing with such tension. How do we, culture’s civilians, balance ideals, the wisdom we have derived from literature, philosophy and religion, and the growing horror of life in the twenty-first century. We’re privileged in the U.S., relatively safe and prosperous unlike residents of, say, Ukraine or Sudan. We’ve experienced nothing like the Poles who were serially raped by the Germans and Russians. That history is behind Zagajewski’s comment made elsewhere that his friend Zbigniew Herbert’s poems are “like a suitcase upholstered in soft satin; but the suitcase holds instruments of torture.” Zagajewski’s characteristic tone in poetry and prose is a gently skeptical irony. His style is plain-spoken (at least in translation) but learned and often wryly amusing. Among American readers and he has too often been mistaken for a “nice guy,” a safely inoffensive fellow. He’s seldom strident and is not by nature a dogmatist of any school. He is Roman Catholic down to the chromosome level but never a preacher. Consider this ingenious metaphor from the Barcelona interview: “An elevated style, which is devoid of a sense of humour and full of indulgence for our ridiculous, cruel and imperfect world, would be similar to the quarries of Carrara in Tuscany, from where all the marble has been extracted and there is only whiteness left. “ That’s the danger, coming off as superior, safely above the concerns of mere mortals. Such a tone is not exclusive to left or right. It might be called haughty, snobbish, cold. Zagajewski continues: “An elevated style comes from a constant conversation between two spheres: the spiritual sphere, the guardians and creators of which are the dead, and on the other hand, that of the eternal present, our path, our unique instant, the box of time that we have to live in. The elevated style acts as an intermediary between the spirits of the past, between Virgil and young people engrossed in rock, who slide around on skateboards on the narrow pavements of western cities. The honest writer must combine the ugliness of life with ‘the beauty it possesses in his work.’” “Fire” (trans. Renata Gorczynski, Tremor, 1985): “Probably I am an ordinary middle-class believer in individual rights, the word ‘freedom’ is simple to me, it doesn’t mean the freedom of any class in particular. Politically naive, with an average education (brief moments of clear vision are its main nourishment), I remember the blazing appeal of that fire which parches the lips of the thirsty crowd and burns books and chars the skin of cities. I used to sing those songs and I know how great it is to run with others; later, by myself, with the taste of ashes in my mouth, I heard the lie’s ironic voice and the choir screaming and when I touched my head I could feel the arched skull of my country, its hard edge.”   The exchange with the Spaniard concludes with the interviewer asking a fairly fatuous question: “To what extent should poets have firm and clear opinions about contemporary problems?” Zagajewski replies: “They must have firm opinions about life and death, but not political opinions: I don't think that tax reform legislation is any business of poets.”   Zagajewski would have turned eighty today.  He was born in Lwów a month after the conclusion of the war in Europe. He died at age seventy-five in Kraków on March 21, 2021.

If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock. Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain. Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute assurance that time can grind down even the heaviest boulder, smooth even the sharpest edge. Rising forty feet above the rocky cliffs of Carmel is a great poem of gravity and granite that Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20,… read article

Marginalia: An experiment sharing notes from the margins of my research.

“A man may profess to understand the President of the United States, but he seldom alleges, even to himself, that he understands his own wife.”  Anecdotal Evidence attracts an admirably knowledgeable set of readers, mostly proud amateurs like its author. As best I can judge, academics are strangers to the blogosphere in general and this blog in particular. That’s not a complaint. I assume most of my readers, like me, are interested in books, not posturing or theorizing about them, or turning them into political fables. They seek, to varying degrees, wisdom and pleasure, as all grownup readers do. They accept that authors understand more than their critics, even when they understand little or nothing. Part of the pleasure of being alive is relishing the mystery surrounding us.   The sentence at the top is characteristic of its author -- shrewd, a tad cynical, definitely more comic than sententious. A seasoned reader might deduce his identity but not who he is writing about. Here he describes the manner of that writer:   “[He] always shows us a picture that is full of the little obscurities, the uncertainties of outline, the mysterious shadings-off, that we see in the real world around us. He does not pretend to the traditional omniscience of the novelist. He is not forever translating the unknowable in motive and act into ready formula . . .”   No cheating. Who is writing about whom on June 20, 1916?

The year is 1937. Elias Canetti (July 25, 1905–August 14, 1994) — Bulgarian, Jewish, living in Austria as the Nazis are rising to power — has just lost his mother; his mother, whose bottomless love had nurtured the talent that would win him the Nobel Prize in his seventies; his mother, who had raised him alone after his father’s death when Elias was seven (the kind of “wound that turns into a lung through which you breathe,” he would later reflect). Having left chemistry to study philosophy, trading the science of life for the art of learning to die, Canetti,… read article