Adam Zagajewski: The Wry Metaphysician

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2005 by Lewis, Tess

Inspiration's main threat today is less the weight of history or oppressive political systems, than the "amorphous power of stupidity that typifies mass culture." Contemporary culture, in its ignorance of the inner life and aversion to quiet reflection, not only can "not create this [inner] life, it drains it, corrodes it, undermines it." These are not mere rhetorical flourishes. Zagajewski has witnessed the deadening effect on a society caused by the suffocation or attempted regulation of the individual's inner life. The writers he treasures are those who possess the ardor necessary to enrich the inner life and defend it from indifference and lethargy as well as from those who would regulate or censor it.

In the essays that follow, Zagajewski recalls the excitement of his first encounter with the "desperate yet joyful affirmation of our fragile human existence" in Nietzsche's early writings, and his disenchantment as the voice of the "nimble and buoyant" artist was overwhelmed by that of the "perverse moralist obsessed with settling scores with Christianity, socialism, morality" in Zarathustm, Ecce Homo, and Will to Power. Another essay is a eulogy of the painter and essayist Joseph Czapski, known as the "Witness of Katyn" for his efforts to uncover the fate of the almost fifteen thousand Polish officers murdered on Stalin's orders. Zagajewski remembers Czapski drifting "through Paris, sketchbook in hand, waiting for some sunbeam to open the doors of vision, . . . some color to speak in the language of ecstasy." Zagajewski also considers Zbigniew Herbert, the "ecstatic pessimist" Czeslaw Milosz, and, unexpectedly, the cynical pessimist E. M. Cioran. Cioran's posthumously published diaries, which he had ordered burned, reveal a surprising religious dimension to his thought. As a result, Zagajewski finds a place for him in the French tradition of Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and Chamfort with their "malicious mockery that conceals a rarely expressed maximalist ideal of humanity with religious overtones."

Although all of these particular embodiments of ardor and metaphysical seriousness are dead, Zagajewski is not an embittered cultural conservative pining for a golden age. He praises chaotic, omnivorous reading, insisting one read the authors who inspire as well as those who challenge and elicit despair, that one read because one's life-inner and outer-depends on it. For all his strong opinions, Zagajewski has left his place among the Catos of the world. He is not content to scold or praise but also leads by example with his own poetry. He ends his poem about Lvov with an affirmation of that elusive but omnipresent mystery: the spiritual world:

and now in a hurry just

pack, always, each day,

and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all

it exists, quiet and pure as

a peach. It is everywhere.

1 A DEFENSE OF ARDOR, by Adam Zagajewski. Trans. by Clare Cavanagh. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.00. The earlier volumes of essays are Another Beauty (2000), Two Cities: Essays on Exile, History, and the Imagination (1995), and Solidarity, Solitude (1990). His volumes of poetry include Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002), Mysticism far Beginners (1997), Canvas (1991), and Tremor (1985).