Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz
While randomly dipping into this gem as I watched the Sonics tank against the Spurs, I came across a number of interesting comments, which is par for the course from Milosz.
“It’s very difficult to reconstruct the perceptions you had at one age or another. We usually project back from the present. Even our ideas and the books we’ve read transform reality – our outlook on reality is constantly shaped by literature. Many things in the world are shaped by literature, even where one would least suspect it. The trials and hangings of the witches in Salem resulted from a book about witches by Cotton Mather. The book was widely read, and women under its influence came to believe they were possessed. That’s how it started. It all came from a book.” (3)
“… You could say that I’ve read the whole debate on the reality of the world. That debate began quite early and in some ways determined the direction of modern philosophy. But I frankly admit that I don’t find the epistemological side o fthe question very enticing. I acknowledge the importance of all that, but those are mountains of wisdom that I prefer not to climb … I’ve always said that I’m not a philosopher, I’d prefer not to take a position in that quarrel.” (286)
On a quotation from Simone Weil: “On Judgment Day, when creation is laid bare by the light of God which reveals it utterly, it becomes pure light; there is no more evil.” Milosz: “That’s right: by then it has reached apokatastasis. Origen thought that at the end of the world even the Devil would be saved.”
Apokatastasis is defined in the Catholic Encyclopedia as “the doctrine which teaches that a time will come when all free creatures will share in the grace of salvation; in a special way, the devils and lost souls.”
On his essay “Reality” in “The Garden of Knowledge”: “My concern was not to trace its lineage in the history of aesthetics. Those conflicts go beyond formulations. The formulations codify fundamentally divergent attitudes toward reality. Cezanne was fascinated by nature, the visual world. All his life he tried t opaint from models, from nature. At times, that sort of fidelity has a strange way of almost leading to abstract art; it gradually evolves in that direction. Today, there are contradictory tendencies. One is the penchant for form, ecriture, writing that feeds on itself. This tendency, which is very strong today, moves away from nature; it is antimimesis. There is another and opposite trend: the attempt to describe reality, to depict reality. There are few artists exploring this second path, because reality is so very elusive.” (302)
Maybe it’s bad form to stack the comments of one writer up against the work of another, but when I read this I couldn’t help but think of Nabokov as a writer whose fidelity to the visual world does lead to an art of tremendous abstraction. How else to account for such puzzles as are contained in almost everything he wrote? Those sentences that often come to resemble the chess problems he so enjoyed making often began as everyday observations of the world around him. And Pale Fire is certainly a work that ‘feeds on literature’ – perhaps it can even be said (with no prejudice intended) that it feeds on itself. Milosz would probably wince at being compared to a Russian (I don’t see any comments on N. in the index), but there it is: language itself as a natural phenomenon, even at its most mimetic. And Nabokov shows us what a joyous conundrum this can be.
Perhaps the most perceptive of Milosz' comments appears on the inside flap of the dust jacket: "It's possible to detect a single refrain in everything I've said here - namely the desire not to appear other than I am." What a wonderful writer he was. And conversationalist, to judge from this book.
“It’s very difficult to reconstruct the perceptions you had at one age or another. We usually project back from the present. Even our ideas and the books we’ve read transform reality – our outlook on reality is constantly shaped by literature. Many things in the world are shaped by literature, even where one would least suspect it. The trials and hangings of the witches in Salem resulted from a book about witches by Cotton Mather. The book was widely read, and women under its influence came to believe they were possessed. That’s how it started. It all came from a book.” (3)
“… You could say that I’ve read the whole debate on the reality of the world. That debate began quite early and in some ways determined the direction of modern philosophy. But I frankly admit that I don’t find the epistemological side o fthe question very enticing. I acknowledge the importance of all that, but those are mountains of wisdom that I prefer not to climb … I’ve always said that I’m not a philosopher, I’d prefer not to take a position in that quarrel.” (286)
On a quotation from Simone Weil: “On Judgment Day, when creation is laid bare by the light of God which reveals it utterly, it becomes pure light; there is no more evil.” Milosz: “That’s right: by then it has reached apokatastasis. Origen thought that at the end of the world even the Devil would be saved.”
Apokatastasis is defined in the Catholic Encyclopedia as “the doctrine which teaches that a time will come when all free creatures will share in the grace of salvation; in a special way, the devils and lost souls.”
On his essay “Reality” in “The Garden of Knowledge”: “My concern was not to trace its lineage in the history of aesthetics. Those conflicts go beyond formulations. The formulations codify fundamentally divergent attitudes toward reality. Cezanne was fascinated by nature, the visual world. All his life he tried t opaint from models, from nature. At times, that sort of fidelity has a strange way of almost leading to abstract art; it gradually evolves in that direction. Today, there are contradictory tendencies. One is the penchant for form, ecriture, writing that feeds on itself. This tendency, which is very strong today, moves away from nature; it is antimimesis. There is another and opposite trend: the attempt to describe reality, to depict reality. There are few artists exploring this second path, because reality is so very elusive.” (302)
Maybe it’s bad form to stack the comments of one writer up against the work of another, but when I read this I couldn’t help but think of Nabokov as a writer whose fidelity to the visual world does lead to an art of tremendous abstraction. How else to account for such puzzles as are contained in almost everything he wrote? Those sentences that often come to resemble the chess problems he so enjoyed making often began as everyday observations of the world around him. And Pale Fire is certainly a work that ‘feeds on literature’ – perhaps it can even be said (with no prejudice intended) that it feeds on itself. Milosz would probably wince at being compared to a Russian (I don’t see any comments on N. in the index), but there it is: language itself as a natural phenomenon, even at its most mimetic. And Nabokov shows us what a joyous conundrum this can be.
Perhaps the most perceptive of Milosz' comments appears on the inside flap of the dust jacket: "It's possible to detect a single refrain in everything I've said here - namely the desire not to appear other than I am." What a wonderful writer he was. And conversationalist, to judge from this book.
posted by Quin Finnegan at 9:05 PM
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