'The Most Dangerous People'

The Australian-born poet Peter Porter begins “The World’s Wedding” (Fast Forward, 1984) with these lines: “The most dangerous people are those / for whom the present is the only reality.” I thought first of those without historical sense, ignorant of the past that created them and gave them the world to enjoy and endure. I remember speaking with my high-school English teacher less than a decade after I graduated in 1970, a year that in her experience signaled a cultural shift. After that, in her words, the students had become “inert.” She could no longer allude to historical figures and assume her students would recognize the names. She cited Winston Churchill and Duke Ellington. At the time I thought she was exaggerating. 

The obvious corollary is that people without knowledge of the past, or who have accepted a fabricated version of the past, are readily manipulated. They live without context and have nothing to weigh the present against. Nadezhda Mandelstam writes in the chapter titled “Memory” in Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974):

 

“If the first way of evading responsibility is not to recollect at all, the second and most widespread way of silencing the voice of memory is to embellish and streamline oneself and indulge in wishful thinking—which  is, of course, much simpler with reference to the past than the present. This is a most typical human weakness. How easy to console oneself by touching up the past to make it look as though it was a bed of roses [or an unrelieved hell]!”

 

With a sift of emphasis, there is another way to understand Porter’s assertion. Recalling his time in the NKVD’s Lubyanka prison in Moscow, the Polish poet Aleksander Wat writes:

 

“[A] thing that is particularly hard to bear and that is experienced to perfection in Lubyanka in cells that are absolutely walled off from the world are those paradoxes of time when the present becomes incredibly distended, expanded like an accordion, while the time behind you, the past, contracts. It seems that the days you have behind you, the past, are only a single day, that time contracts, has little content, whereas the time you have ahead of you is a wasteland, totally terrifying.”

 

These observations are from My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, edited and translated in 1988 by Richard Lourie from transcripts of conversations Wat had late in life with Czesław Miłosz. As a young man Wat became a Communist. After fleeing the Nazis he was arrested by the Soviets and spent more than two years in various jails and prisons in Poland and the Soviet Union, and eventually was exiled to Kazakhstan. Wat, who was Jewish, converted to Catholicism. In his memoir he recalls overhearing a passage from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion while in Lubyanka:

 

“If the human voice, manmade instruments, and the human soul can create, even once in all of history, such harmony, beauty, truth, and power in such unity of inspiration—if this exists, then how ephemeral, what a nonentity all the might of empires must be. That might a beautiful Polish carol says ‘quakes in fear.’ It’s a commonplace line, but I’m an old man and I stopped being afraid of the commonplace a long time ago—what the critics call a commonplace. That wasn’t a thought I had while listening to Bach because I simply wasn’t a ‘thinking being’ at that moment. I was listening. But that thought did come to me as the last chords were fading. With desperate nostalgia I tried to summon them back from memory, but to no avail. The only sound was the wind howling over the roof of Lubyanka.”

 

Wat was born on this date, May 1, in 1900 and died in 1967 at age sixty-seven.