| Czeslaw Milosz Article by Leon Wieseltier | | Print | |
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September 12, 2004 Sunday Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 7; Column 1; Book Review Desk; ESSAY; Pg. 31 LENGTH: 1536 words HEADLINE: Czeslaw Milosz, 1911-2004 BYLINE: By Leon Wieseltier. Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic. BODY: ''The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation,'' declared Czeslaw Milosz in one of the many poems in which he speculated upon the experience of dying. The poem explains that the fall occurs because the nation is no longer mighty, ''its cities are empty, its population dispersed / . . . its mission forgotten, its language lost.'' Yet it is the death of this man that is like the fall of a mighty nation, but a nation full and undispersed, its mission honored and its language imperishable. The magnitude of Czeslaw Milosz, who died in Krakow on Aug. 14 at the age of 93, is almost unimaginable. He was a hero of the history of his time and a hero of the literature of his time. For friends and for strangers, for lovers of liberty and for lovers of beauty, he was, for more than half a century, an indispensable man. Milosz discharged his obligations to his age and his obligations to his soul with the same diligence and the same depth. The stability of his mind, its preternatural composure, was one of the great sanctuaries of the 20th century, a prophecy of the eventual emancipation. He had the rare gift of knowing how to be at once troubled and unperturbed. When light was needed, he was light; when stone was needed, he was stone. Milosz's spiritual intensity never interfered with his historical clarity. His inner freedom seems never to have failed him. His life and his work justified, in all their complexities, the most elementary belief in the power of the truth. He had the face of a hawk and the heart of a dove. He was as tough as time, or almost. ''Like many of my generation, I could have wished that my life had been a more simple affair.'' In the ancient and awful year 1951, with that quiet sentence, Milosz began ''The Captive Mind,'' his lucid and crushing analysis of the intellectual and psychological disfigurements of totalitarianism; and in that same year he defected from Communist Poland (he was the cultural attache at the Polish embassy in Paris at the time) and began his long and fecund exile in France and then in the United States. ''The Captive Mind'' is one of the classics of anti-Stalinism, which is to say it is one of the glories of an exceedingly inglorious period in the intellectual history of the West. Milosz insisted that the war against totalitarianism was at its foundation a war of ideas: ''It was only toward the middle of the 20th century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.'' The road from concepts to corpses was short and straight. But Milosz resisted the impulse to make a romance out of his side, out of the right side. ''Speculative thought is vile,'' he remarked in an essay on Pasternak. His revolt against one theory was not animated by another theory. ''My own decision proceeded not from the functioning of the reasoning mind, but from a revolt of the stomach.'' He always spoke of tyranny and its defenders with a kind of aristocratic disgust -- but he was liberalism's aristocrat, one of the princes of the faith that freedom comes first. Democrats are history's real nobles. As a consequence of his many disputations with totalitarianism -- and of some of his early poems, such as ''Campo dei Fiori,'' the lament for the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, ''the lonely / forgotten by the world,'' that he wrote in Warsaw in 1943 as the ghetto was burning -- Milosz became renowned as a witness to his time. This diminishes not only his achievement as a writer, but also his achievement as a rebel. For the struggle against Communism was also a struggle against historicism, against the belief in the sufficiency of history for the understanding of life. Milosz's teaching was that history was no more to be granted the last word. One does not live entirely, or even mainly, for one's time. The soul exceeds its circumstances. So even in his dissent, history did not command Milosz. Did the totalitarians justify their utopia with an ideal of totality? Then they could be vanquished by denying them the whole. He accomplished his severance from history in his poetry. In the bleakest hours of World War II, Milosz produced a masterpiece called ''The World,'' a sequence of 20 ''naive'' poems ''written in the style of school primers,'' in which the rudiments of a child's world -- the road, the gate, the porch, the dining room, the stairs, the poppies, the peonies -- are portrayed with the indomitability of genuine innocence. Against the horror, he pitted pastoral! And all the while he was working with the Polish underground. There were two ways, then, of resisting evil: engagement and disengagement; attachment and detachment; action against it and contemplation despite it. In his dark era, Milosz was the master of this complication, this salvation, of consciousness. ''They are incomprehensible, the things of this earth,'' he exclaimed in one of his many doxologies of the phenomenal world. His reading of East Asian poetry confirmed Milosz in his preference for poems that ''honored the object, not the subject.'' Oppressed by the reductions of the intellectuals, and in arms against their consequences, he chose to learn about things from the things themselves. The great depravity notwithstanding, he extolled ''the holy word: Is.'' All that he required for a justification of existence was a description of existence. ' 'Description demands intense observation, so intense that the veil of everyday habit falls away and what we paid no attention to, because it struck us as so ordinary, is revealed as miraculous.'' Is this mysticism? Not precisely, though it approaches Simone Weil's characterization of prayer as ''absolutely unmixed attention.'' I remember the long conversation in a wintry airport in 1982 when we cemented our friendship with the discovery that we shared an envy of mystics. His hostility to materialism carried this suave and profoundly modern man all the way to the old metaphysics. Milosz's otherwise withering intellect was gladly patient with mystery. In the traditional cosmologies, in the religious pictures of the world, he found unceasing stimulation, for his poetry and his philosophy. ''If I accomplished anything, it was only when I, a pious boy, chased after the disguises of the lost Reality.'' He was not embarrassed by the crudities of religion: they were the imagination's answers to the mind's questions. They created the ''second space'' (that is the title of a forceful collection of new poems that will be published, now posthumously, by Ecco Press next month) without which he saw no possibility of human flourishing. Milosz's verses speak often of God and often to God. But there was nothing settled or doctrinal about his God. The annals of suffering insulated him against some of theism's complacencies. ''Wandering on the outskirts of heresy is about right for me,'' he wrote not long before he died. He was just ''a chaplain of shadows.'' Milosz was indebted to religion not least for the pleasure of doubt. He experienced a religious crisis in his youth that rattled his Catholicism and ''set me searching.'' His journey led him not to churches but to saints, and to a conviction about the heterodox nature of truth: to ' 'modes of eccentric vision.'' (He admired even Swedenborg.) Milosz's journey was the antithesis of Cavafy's journey. ''Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. / Without her you would not have set out. / She has nothing left to give you now,' ' the Greek poet famously instructed Odysseus in ''Ithaka,'' one of the founding documents of modern irony. For Milosz, by contrast, the journey was not the goal, the goal was the goal. Irony, for which he had a wicked appetite, was not adequate as a meaning for life. He was a man without illusions, holding steadfastly to a confidence in what he could not see. His confidence was vindicated. He survived the flood. The waters receded. He returned home. Finally his spirit could be unconvulsed by history. The lyrics abounded. But in recent months the news from Boguslawski Street was not good. Milosz was dying. There arrived a precious gift from his bed, a thin red volume with a detail from Titian pasted on its cover, called ''Orpheus and Eurydice,'' a poem in memory of his wife, in which Orpheus is hailed as ''having made no rhyme in praise of nothingness''; and in the inscription in Orpheus', I mean Czeslaw's, hand, I saw, for the only time in the years I knew him, evidence of weakness. I thought of Heine, an earlier poet in an earlier battle for freedom in Europe, dying in his bed in Paris, and then I thought of Arnold's severe reflection at Heine's grave, that Goethe was ''destined to work and to live'' but Heine ''only to laugh and to die,'' and then I thought that my friend, in his richness and his resilience, had truly been granted all the destinies. He had come to work and to laugh and to live and to die. And so mourning is now restrained by thanksgiving as blessed Milosz would have wished. You gave me gifts, God-Enchanter. I give you thanks for good and ill. Eternal light in everything on earth. As now, so on the day after my death. |
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