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.

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

“Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library.”  An interesting gauge of human sensibility, a sort of litmus test to judge personality and values, might be to place your subject in a large, well-stocked library (or bookstore), wire him for blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductance, brain activity, etc., and monitor his reactions, followed by a questionnaire to be completed by the subject: Are you frightened? Do you wish to run away? Do you feel bliss? Boredom? Reverence?   The reverent one quoted above is Winston Churchill in “Hobbies,” one of twenty-three essays collected in Thoughts and Adventures (Thornton Butterworth Limited, 1932). This is the man who, while stationed in India from 1896 to 1898 read all 4,000 pages of Gibbon during his daily leisure time, followed by Gibbon’s autobiography, Macaulay’s six-volume History of England, the Lays of Ancient Rome, Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic, and volumes by Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin and Adam Smith, among others. Such heroic reading seems like preparation for the eventual forty-three books in seventy-two volumes Churchill would write, making him a rare deserving recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1953.   Today we can’t imagine a world leader -- or even an English major -- who reads and writes on such a Victorian scale. Churchill confirms the truth of an observation made by Dr. Johnson, as recounted by Boswell: “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” Churchill continues in the essay, describing his own reactions to a library visit:   “‘A few books,’ which was Lord Morley’s definition of anything under five thousand, may give a sense of comfort and even of complacency. But a day in a library, even of modest dimensions, quickly dispels these illusory sensations. As you browse about, taking down book after book from the shelves and contemplating the vast, infinitely-varied store of knowledge and wisdom which the human race has accumulated and preserved, pride, even in its most innocent forms, is chased from the heart by feelings of awe not untinged with sadness. As one surveys the mighty array of sages, saints, historians, scientists, poets and philosophers whose treasures one will never be able to admire—still less enjoy—the brief tenure of our existence here dominates mind and spirit.”   Churchill convinces us he is a genuine bookman. We’ve all been taken in by frauds who brag of having read libraries, or at least the fashionable titles of the day – a deception especially common among politicians. But Churchill has the dedicated reader’s understanding that reading is deeply idiosyncratic, as individual as DNA, a reflection of who we truly are not who we wish the world to think we are:   “‘What shall I do with all my books?’ was the question; and the answer, ‘Read them,’ sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.”

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