'Consent to Be Dazzled'

Another Christmas rich in books, among other things. From my wife:

Portraits Without Frames (New York Review Books, 2018) by Lev Ozerov, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk.

Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia 1941-1942 (New York Review Books, 2018) by Józef Czapski, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Almost Nothing: The 20^th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski (New York Review Books, 2018) by Eric Karpeles.

From my middle son:

The Origins of the Irish (Thames & Hudson, 2013) by J.P. Mallory.

From my sister-in-law:

Sentimental Tales (Columbia University Press, 2018) by Mikhail Zoshchenko, translated by Boris Dralyuk.

And from my daughter-in-law:

God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (Random House, 2018) by Lawrence Wright.

No one planned it, but the books reflect my convergent heritages: Polish, Irish (my wife also gave me Van Morrison's latest CD, The Prophet Speaks), Texan. In his introduction to Almost Nothing, Karpeles quotes a passage from the great title essay in Zbigniew Herbert’s Still Life with a Bridle: Essays and Apocryphas (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, Ecco Press, 1991), in which the Polish poet “describes an encounter with an enigmatic work of art”:

“I understood immediately, though it is hard to explain rationally, something very important had happened; something far more important than an accidental encounter. . . .How to describe the inner state? A suddenly awakened intense curiosity, sharp concentration with sense alarmed, hope for an adventure and consent to be dazzled. I experienced an almost physical sensation as if some one called me, summoned me.”

Herbert dedicates his essay to Czapski.