Without Lifting A Finger

I visited my father a few days ago. Although visit isn’t quite the right word, since he’s not present mentally. Not only does he not recognize me; I always come away with the impression that his gaze no longer retains concrete images, it doesn’t focus on any single object. My father lies in bed and sleeps for days on end. He’s still in his apartment, in his room, he’s well cared for. These visits are so sad. And once I fell into despair because he left without saying goodbye.  * * *  Cioran reports that Dylan Thomas was seized by convulsions and threw himself on the floor when someone once tried to interpret one of his poems in the poet’s presence.  * * *

Rue Servandoni, right by the Luxembourg Gardens. One of my favorite Parisian streets, or rather side streets; quiet, almost always empty. One building bears a plaque informing us that the Marquis Nicolas de Condorcet spent the last months of his life in hiding here; he’d been sentenced to death by the Revolution. In the end, he left his hiding place, was recognized, denounced, arrested, and shortly afterward died in prison under uncertain circumstances. In the months preceding his arrest he worked on his final project, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain. The Revolution’s thugs were out to get him, and he writes on progress! He listened for footsteps echoing in the quiet side street, but retained his faith in progress. He kept one ear open for his persecutors’ footsteps, while the other heard the ever-advancing music of the future. He witnessed the terror unleashed by the Jacobins, but never lost his faith in human perfectibility. I don’t know what to admi...

Systems have turned us into slaves, dwarfs. The disinterested contemplation of life is a different matter, as for example in Paul Claudel’s “Second Ode,” where the author exclaims, “Oh Credo full of things seen and unseen.” That’s finally all that counts: disinterested contemplation of the world, brimming with admiration or revulsion, or both together. Systems don’t permit disinterested contemplation: they’re sieves, they sift, segregate, eliminate, smooth, simplify, diminish. Systems are like mnemonic devices, ideal for accelerated evening courses … A person who masters any one of them—it demands just a few months of intensive cramming—will be liberated from true knowledge, from authentic, free, gleeful erudition open to reality, but open as well to dozens of varied traditions, hundreds of different painters, composers, writers, united by nothing, almost, except perhaps their unconditional refusal to be tidied within a single system. Each sought truth at first hand, painfully, in j...

I walked through the Planty Gardens; a little girl zipped past me on a scooter and at that moment I grasped the essence of motion. But I can’t explain it.

In the monumental four-volume anthology of French poetry edited by Jerzy Lisowski and completed after his death, I find a poem whose history is somehow near to me; its author is Gilbert Lely, and the title is “Word and Cold.” Gilbert Lely. Gilbert Lely was a writer linked to surrealism, known—as I read in the encyclopedia—for his erotic poems as well as for a highly regarded biography of Sade. But I know just the one poem, and that’s all I’ll mention here. A Polish version of this poem turned up in the anthology of French poetry, as translated by Konstanty Jelenski. I remember that Jelenski found this poem in yet another anthology, Une anthologie de la poésie française, published by Jean-François Revel in December 1985. The poem struck him, and he gave his translation to the Polish journal Literary Notebooks. I’ll give an excerpt from this—truly beautiful—poem, in which the author (speaker) visits his own grave as he strolls through autumnal Paris.  It’s still empty, waiting ...

Should've been reading Yeats in Ireland, I suppose. But, sort of aping last year's reading of Coleridge's Letters in Scotland, I went with Keats (not really into his poetry, but his letters are quite poignant -- especially knowing the end of the story -- and at times quite interesting re content and language) because his letters are "new to me" and they were already drawing me in, i.e., I had already started them and liked them (Zagajewski had pointed the way). Though Keats occupied most of my reading time in Ireland (and of course the focus was "Seeing Ireland" not "Reading Keats"), I also continued pecking away at (deliciously pecking away at) Szymborska's poems. * Clips: You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out, — you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away — I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness — I look not for...

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...

To Go to Lvov by Adam Zagajewski : The Poetry Foundation Follow the link to read the whole poem. It begins: To go to Lvov. Which station for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew gleams on a suitcase,...