'Read a Little, Listen to a Little Music'

“To tend the world: read a little, listen to a little music.” 

I was slow to warm to the late Adam Zagajewski. I still prefer his essays to his poems, which often seem sentimental and formless, as though he demanded too little of himself when writing poetry. Only in the five volumes of his prose so far translated into English does Zagajewski seem like a true son of his literary father, Zbigniew Herbert. In Another Beauty (trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2000), he recalls Herbert’s stance as an independent writerly conscience and proposes a new (or ancient but resuscitated) species he calls the “historian-poet.” Consider his rather optimistic literary prognosis:

 

“We are in fact witnessing a revival of literature that serves this very purpose, but almost no one’s paid attention: writers’ journals, memoirs, poets’ autobiographies harken back to an archaic literary tradition, the writing of history from the viewpoint of a sovereign individual and not an assistant professor, a slave to modish methodologies, a state employee who must flatter simultaneously both the powers that be and the reigning Parisian epistemology.”

 

His words are stirring and hopeless. How often do we encounter so unfettered a literary mind among contemporary writers of any sort? Our digitalized world ought to have made Zagajewski’s proposals readily attainable. Every man his Gutenberg. Instead, the herd-mind has metastasized. Politics, navel-gazing and aliteracy  have scuttled the hope. Zagajewski, with obvious reservations, is the legitimate heir of Orwell at his rare best. Zagajewski makes his own suggestions, some unexpected, mostly from an earlier era:

 

“. . . the autobiographies of Edwin Muir, Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Brodsky, among other poets, the essays of Hubert Butler, Nicola Chiaromonte, the notebooks of Jozef Czapski, Albert Camus . . . The sketches of Zbigniew Herbert, Jerzy Stempowski, of Boleslaw Micinski, ill with tuberculosis. Here are people who refused to cheat, who eagerly sought out the truth and shrank from neither poetry nor terror, the two poles of our globe – since poetry does exist in the world, in certain events, at rare moments. And there’s also no shortage of terror.”

 

His mention of Butler, the great Irish essayist, is gratifying. Add Theodore Dalrymple and the late Simon Leys, principled writers who never turn politics into a religion. The sentence quoted at the top, from Another Beauty, is no formula for happiness. Rather, it recalls the self-care of a civilized mind, something like Montaigne’s retirement to his tower. Zagajewski is not calling for quietism, a self-centered withdrawal from the world. He writes, a few pages later:  

 

“I didn't witness the extermination of the Jews, I was born too late. I bore witness, though to the gradual process by which Europe recovered its memory. This memory moved slowly, more like a lazy lowland river than a mountain stream, but it finally, unambiguously condemned the evil of the Holocaust and the Nazis, and the evil of Soviet civilization as well (though in this it was less successful, as if reluctant to admit that two such monstrosities might simultaneously coexist).”