Wednesday, July 21, 2021

'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.”

2 comments:

  1. I met Zagajewski when he came to Louisville to read one evening. He was seriously funny and wise during his delivery, and generous with his time when finished. He was especially generous to me, personally. I had met Milosz years before and, though polite, he was intimidating (but perhaps that was my own insecurity). It seemed that Zagajewski would have been at home in the backyard, having a drink and laughing while waiting for the food to come off the grill. He's gone, of course, but I have most of his books on my shelf. That will have to do.

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  2. It's amazing how nihilists and relativists still insist on being paid for their services. I guess there is one thing they really believe in.

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