Without Lifting A Finger

Re the painter/writer Jozef Czapski: He had many friends, who loved and admired him unreservedly to the end. He was in essence, though, a solitary man. He was my friend and master. The master of my not-knowing. And what is not-knowing but thought? Re an "inner life": Contemporary mass culture, entertaining and at times harmless as it may be, is marked by its complete ignorance of the inner life. Not only can it not create this life; it drains it, corrodes it, undermines it. Science, caught up in other problems, likewise neglects it. Thus only a few artists, philosophers, and theologians are left to defend this fragile, besieged fortress. Defending the spiritual life is not merely a sop thrown to the radical aesthetes. I see the spiritual life, the inner voice that speaks to us, or perhaps only whispers, in Polish, English, Russian, or Greek, as the mainstay and foundation of our freedom, the indispensable territory of reflection and independence shielding us from ...

Two "clips": Our great reality obviously contains many other elements as well. Can we count them all? Should we?   They include not only darkness, tragedy, and madness but also joy. Not long ago I was rereading the essays of Jerzy Stempowski, a major Polish essayist who spent the second half of his life as a humble émigré in Switzerland, in Berne, where he died in 1969. And I came upon a surprising quotation from Maupassant—surprising, since you don’t expect metaphysical gifts from naturalists! I must have come across it earlier, but its force struck me this time. From time to time I experience strange, intense, short-lived visions of beauty, an unfamiliar, elusive, barely perceptible beauty that surfaces in certain words or landscapes, certain colorations of the world, certain moments … I’m not able to describe or communicate it, I can’t express it or portray it. I save these moments for myself … I have no other reason for continuing, no other cause for keeping on … “S...