A Poet's Religious Humanism
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Czeslaw Milosz is a renowned writer of both poetry and prose. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. In his long life, he has seen and written about many of the events of the Twentieth Century, including the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, the Warsaw Uprising, and the rise and fall of communism. He served as a diplomat from Poland to the United States following WWII. Among his books is an incisive critique of communism titled "The Captive Mind".
"To begin where I am" is a selection of Milosz's essays published between 1942 and 1998, some written initially in English, but most written in Polish. The essays are wide-ranging in theme and capture a great deal of the scope of Milosz's passions. The good introduction to the book by Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline Levine point out that Milosz "has centered his writings on a few fundamental philosophical questions: the meaning of history; the existence of evil and suffering; the transience of all life; theascendance of a scientific worldview andthe decline of the religious imagination." The essays are well-arranged into four main sections.
The first group of essays titled "These Guests of Mine" is primarily historical and descriptive in character. I enjoyed particularly Milosz's description of Wilno(Vilna) in his "Dictionary of Wilno Streets."
For me the heart of the book is in the second and third parts, titled "On the Side of Man" and "Against Incomprehensible Poetry." We learn a great deal about a writer by his discussions of those who have influenced him. In this book,Miloscz's essays on the American poet Robinson Jeffers, on the Russian philospher Lev Shestov, and on the French theological thinker Simone Weil are highly thoughtful. They reveal a writer both struggling for a commitment to religion, to Catholicism in particular, in the face of a scientific and material worldview which he finds inconsistent with it, and a writer committed to humanism, to the best in man and culture. They are an inspiring and difficult set of commitments, and Milosz discusses them eloquently.
In Part 3 of the book, the centerpiece is the title essay "Against Incomprehensible Poetry". In this essay, Milosz develops insights from W.H. Auden and makes them his own. Auden had said "there is only one thing that all poetry must do,it must praise all it can for being and for happening." (p.381). This insight becomes the basis of a critique of much obscurantism in modern poetry. We are privileged to hear, in the book, a discussion of the continuing value of poetry and informed discussion of many poets worth knowing, from Whitman, Blake,and Jeffers to many of Milosz's Polish contempories. These latter writers are unknown to me, but Milosz makes one wish for them as companions through his discussions.
The fourth part of the book. "In Constant Amazement", is brief and consists of a collection of aphorisms. The aphorism I found most striking discusses the nature of human sexuality. It begins: "Men and women carry within their imagination an image of themselves and of others as sexual beings and often that is the only thing that humanizes them." (p. 436)
This book helped me with my own thinking and reflection. I hope it will help you with yours as well.
