In
most cases, the autobiographical impulse, unaccompanied by an interesting
sensibility and writing skill, ought to be smothered in the cradle. In the case
of Montaigne, he leaves us wanting more anecdotes, more confessions, more
recherché allusions to his reading. It makes sense that the inventor and namer
of the form – the personal essay -- ought to remain its chief practitioner
after four and a half centuries. I thought of the description quoted above,
from Gilbert Highet’s The Classical
Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949), while
reading the travel essays collected in Marius Kociejowski’s Zoroaster’s Children (Biblioasis, 2015). In particular, Highet’s final sentence
suggests Kociejowski’s approach to writing an essay.
Instead
of the obligatory Prague travelogue, he gives us the archly titled “Christmas,
with Kafka,” which begins with a manger scene in the Old Town Square. Two of
the extras surrounding the Holy Family, a donkey and a llama, start a fight.
“There was more laughter from the mocking circle that put me in mind of the
lumpish figures in Brueghel’s Christ
Falling Beneath the Cross, whose fleetingly warped faces were painted for
all time.” What follows is digression within digression – the inevitable news
of fighting in Bethlehem at Christmas, abandoning plans to follow “the Kafka
trail,” attendance at Leoš Janáček’s opera The
Cunning Little Vixen, an impromptu visit to Kafka’s grave in the New Jewish
Cemetery, and difficulty leaving a stone on the plot. In the wrong hands this
approach might quickly have turned tedious, the exhibitionism of a flighty mind,
but Kociejowski’s touch is light. He isn’t out to impress us with his sensitivity
or his devotion to Kafka. For his persona he chooses a bookish schlemiel.
I
want to leave you with a taste of Kociejowski’s prose, hoping you’ll search out
Zoroaster’s Children and his other
books. I’m finding it easier to describe
his work in the negative, stressing what it is not. When serious, he’s not
strident. When learned, he’s not pedantic. When comic, he’s not childish. In
his introduction to The Norton Book of
Personal Essays (1996), another great essayist, Joseph Epstein writes, “Self-congratulation,
or the imputation of virtue to oneself, is one of the great traps of the
personal essay.” Again, Kociejowski passes the test. The collection’s final
essay, “The Saddest Book I’ll Never Write,” is devoted to Syria, about which he has written several books, in the wake of the
ongoing civil war. In part, it is a eulogy for a country, culture and friends
Kociejowski loves. He writes:
“I
have been asked why there isn’t more of me
in my writings about Syria and the answer, quite simply, is because there would
be less of everything else. I believe, too, one’s character is impressed upon
what one chooses to write about. One of the most important things with which
one must travel is a sense of deference. Only then will there be natural
sympathy with one’s subject.”
Kociejowski’s
carefully nuanced tone and my recollection of Montaigne brought to mind another
great essayist. In 1983, Guy Davenport wrote the introduction to the North
Point Press edition of Montaigne’s Travel
Journal, later collected in Every
Force Evolves a Form (1987). In it he writes:
“We
all lead a moral inner life of the spirit, on which religion, philosophy, and
tacit opinion have many claims. To reflect on this inner life rationally is a
skill no longer taught, though successful introspection, if it can make us at
peace with ourselves, is sanity itself. The surest teachers of such reflection,
certainly the wittiest and most forgiving, are Plutarch and Montaigne.”
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