'Spots Where the Bus of Dailiness Stopped'

There’s a tone of voice I’ve come to recognize as arrogance veneered with civility. Masters of the form disguise their condescension and make it sound like folksy wisdom – Will Rogers in jackboots. They really care about you. You hear it in pundits, commentators, op-ed writers, “influencers” (there’s a ghastly new word) – in short, power-hungry gasbags and attention-seekers. I encountered a mutation of the species the other day. Out of his mouth came a sort of bastardized version of logical positivism – in effect, intellectual aridity coupled with self-righteousness. Think of it as domesticated nihilism. This guy’s overeducated message was that everything you and I believe, all of our values, are fraudulent. 

My ignorance seems to metastasize as I get older. Mysteries abound. The late Adam Zagajewski in Slightly Exaggerated (trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2017) articulates something of what I’m trying to express:

 

“I don’t know if I remember this correctly, from my late childhood, from the time when I first began to recognize, to suspect, some kind of doubleness in the world’s nature: It’s not just the perfectly obvious, empirical layer, the opulent, imperial layer that dominates life’s chief currents, that makes up all the basic components of a relatively stable life . . . something else lies concealed beneath it, something unnamed, without which quotidian ordinariness would wither, shrivel like a scrap of paper cast into a fire.”

 

Perhaps an openness to such a possibility, which requires an admission of incomprehension, is a prerequisite for leading a life of relative decency. Zagajewski links his early intuition of the world’s doubleness to his discovery of reading. In Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), he grew up near a public library: “I was a passionate reader, mainly of novels.” He writes:

 

“The library . . . is a realm of free love, offering unencumbered romance, fleeting affairs, fickle reading, sometimes rapture, sometimes boredom, but always the option of quick changes.”

 

As a kid, you may have known something like Zagajewski’s elation in the company of books. I did and sometimes still do. Here’s how he relates it to that sense of another world beneath the familiar world:

 

“At times the books brought the mobile surface of events to a halt. And not just the books. At times all reality seemed to stand still. When I ran from the house out to the street, I was free, open to every adventure. Others apparently couldn’t see these adventures, they took place only in my inner world.”

 

That inner realm, dismissed as delusion by the positivist, is a sacred place, immune to politics and other forms of control. Zagajewski, born into Stalinist Poland, survived them: “These were fixed points, spots where the bus of dailiness stopped. Points of momentary freedom. That might return.” Elsewhere in Slightly Exaggerated he writes:

  

“Mozart’s melancholy cheered me, like the melancholy of Schubert. At times, I preferred a single line of Montale to the aphorisms of Cioran.”