'It Was an Attempt to Trick Fate'

Czesław Miłosz and Aleksander Wat are talking about the way we experience the passage of time. While in a Soviet prison, Wat says, the monotony became “a confusion of time.” Each moment extended “almost infinitely.” Some of us will remember similar, less punishing moments from childhood, when a dull school lesson or the tiresome chatter of adults turned into a prison sentence without bars. I’m reminded of the title of Jean Stafford’s 1953 story collection, Children Are Bored on Sunday. Wat asks, “How can you live through an entire hour that grows longer with the passage of time?” Miłosz replies:

 

“I understand perfectly. I know about that more or less from experience, but if you read and lose yourself in reading, in another world, then all that stops.”

 

I’ve never been to prison and seldom experience truly grinding boredom. I know boring situations and boring people, but they quickly pass. I’m grateful that my nature, whatever it is that constitutes me, left to its own devices, keeps itself amusingly occupied on most occasions.

 

Last week I experienced, unexpectedly, what Miłosz describes. I was reading a novel by the late Ward Just, The American Blues (1984) – the last of his books that I got around to reading. It’s not top-shelf Just but it’s well-written and never less than intelligent – the story of a journalist who covered the war in Vietnam for years (like Just) and, back in the U.S., is trying to complete a book about it. It’s also a sort of domestic drama, dealing with the unnamed narrator’s wife and son. I read twenty pages or so one night, picked it up the flowing night and finished the rest of its 205 pages. I’m not a speed-reader. This is about concentration not competition. To use Miłosz’s phrase, late at night I lost myself in the book, an act of almost total self-forgetting. Ward Just gets the credit here. I found his story compelling, without a boring stretch. The cat on my lap melted into the experience of consuming the text. There’s no way I could have planned any of that.

 

In reply, Wat brings us back to the real world: “Naturally," he agrees with Miłosz. "But you can’t read all the time, not because you’re not allowed to. You’re allowed to. But you mustn’t. Just as you have to know how to die on your feet, you also have to go on living. Reading was paradise, a delicacy, but it was an attempt to trick fate. A narcotic. An escape into anesthesia, despite everything. Though it was more than that too.”

 

[My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, was edited and translated in 1988 by Richard Lourie from transcripts of conversations Wat had late in life with Miłosz.]

 

[The epigraph to The American Blues is taken from the prologue to Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941): “The word ‘idiot’ comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.”