Des Essientes: I had the impression that maybe Czes³aw had started to go a little crazy
As Mi³osz admits, his book is both exotic and eccentric, he says that a writer can afford to produce in his lifetime one maverick work; to be frank with readers, he warns them: Dear reader, this book was not intended for you, and I feel you should be forewarned before you enter its bizarre tangle. Maybe it is not for you, maybe it is not for me either.
Many times value lies in what we push aside as worthless. I think this book gives only but glimpses to dangerous truths which are yet to be sheltered from the wrong people. In the land of Ulro it is better to keep thoughts to himself/herself. The fate of such men like Ezra Pound on the one hand and Bruno Jasieñski on the other proves that it is easier to go along to get along than to go against the flow. Now when we all found themselves in the end of history and the only legitimate citizens of this world are the worshipers of the Golden Calf there arise a question where this brave new world is aiming at. Mi³osz when he wrote about Nazism and Stalinism considered both ideologies as dead, so he tried to take on something considerebly more profound. I think that he gained a measure of success in it. He provided a good, tho' vague diagnosis, but did not show us the way out of the land of Ulro.
Now about those vague terms he uses. First, "eternal existence in one divine Man". Have you ever come to think of eternity and what it is? I understand eternity as something you share with other people, either people of the past or of the future, something which does not die in you when you die - that's what I understand by a divine Man. I think that Mi³osz does not want us to return to past time - to the medieval ages, but seeks for a new science, new knowledge, which would return a man to his spiritual home and out of the world in which he is reduced to a superfluous number in a mechanistic universe.
And last excerpt, I think an interesting one:
An idea or an inspiration, no matter how noble, becomes watered down and devalued the more it is worked over by inferior minds; in other words, “everything of substance is undermined, hollowed out by the termites of inferiority.” Says Mi³osz, A priest nurtured on the Freudian-Marxian-Chardinian dregs will be a priest in name only; a teacher, though able to read and write, an illiterate and a corruptor; a politician, an outlaw; artists and poets, the helpers of circus managers who stage spectacles with real blood and live copulation, exactly as in those Roman circus-theaters described by Tertullian. There is the “law of triumphant banality” in which, “weathered by time, the transitory and the spurious fade into gray banality.”
Isn't this an accurate description of where we have found ourselves now?
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