A Defense of Ardor Page 14
But Cioran’s drama can be interpreted differently, more individually, as the record of a single, distinctive soul; the story of his love for poetry forms one thread in this thousand-page book. In a nutshell—it is the story of poetry slowly being strangled by skepticism, by doubt. Cioran has his favorite poets: Dickinson, Shelley, Dowson. But he turns to them ever more rarely, grows ever further from poetry. He can’t bear Rilke’s letters, and prefers the cynicism in some of Gottfried Benn’s letters. Poetry’s rival is bitter, mocking, illusionless prose. The only poet who speaks to him in the end is Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach’s music always astounds him, commands him to cross to the other side, the side of joy, affirmation, and God (only Handel’s Messiah has a comparable effect). But just for a moment.
In the diary, Cioran becomes exceptionally laconic whenever moments of poetry appear—as signaled by music or long walks in the lonely landscapes of the French countryside. Doubt, on the other hand, is eloquent; urged on by the author’s voice, Doubt’s pronouncements cut the way Spinoza cut lenses. Cioran’s diary is essentially a platform designed for Doubt’s benefit. In the diary, poetry leads a marginal, almost conspiratorial existence; it dwindles and fades. But even its modest presence lends Cioran’s posthumously published book the charm of novelty, since precisely this love affair with poetry and music permits us to revise our earlier portrait, derived from the essays, of the Parisian misanthrope.
Another book appeared this year in September that would seem to have nothing in common with Cioran’s bloated tome, namely Czeslaw Milosz’s Roadside Dog, a marvelous collection of short prose pieces and poems. Nothing in common? Let’s see if we can’t turn up something …
In the first place, the authors are contemporaries, representatives of the same generation: Milosz is only three months younger than Cioran. They must have bumped into each other in the Paris of the fifties. Furthermore, Roadside Dog, while not a diary, is “diary-like,” a loosely structured, open-ended book. It is also philosophical, even metaphysical; like Cioran’s work, it is a treatise on our world. The resources of memory and experience both writers command are likewise not entirely disparate. Both came to Paris, the City of Light, from the dangerous, uncertain territories of Eastern Europe (although Cioran experienced the Nazi occupation only in its ameliorated French version). Even philosophically speaking, it’s possible to come up with certain similarities between them. Still, it’s difficult to imagine two more different books. The raw material may be similar in both cases: the aversion to utopias, the fascination with religion, the ruthless criticism of Parisian and Western intellectual fads, spiritual independence, the sense both of distance from and, often enough, superiority to their Western intellectual associates. But the existential treatment given this material is diametrically different.
Roadside Dog and Cioran’s Notebooks—when examined up close—are like two still lifes. In one, Milosz’s work, you see a splendid apple and a gleaming oyster in the foreground, and only by peering deep into the background will you glimpse the indistinct silhouette of a guillotine. In Cioran’s picture, on the other hand, pride of place is given to a bare skull and a thin stream of sand trickling through an elegant hourglass that blocks a bunch of grapes. (Though it’s true that in baroque iconography an apple also signifies transience …)
Roadside Dog is, however, a very particular kind of picture. Its author wanted to show us what he ordinarily reveals only reluctantly: the canvas’s dark side, the author’s knowledge of terror, the horror of the Soviet death machine, but also the extermination that faces every living being. Milosz’s treatise on reality is, for all that, a serene work, the work of a classicist who masters the world’s horror not by forgetting it, but rather by feeding upon it in his own way. Despair and doubt are conquered not by classicism alone, after all—that would be too weak a medicine for reality’s evil! Only poetry, that indefinable something that blends together joy and grief like oxygen and nitrogen. Poetry, that tiny grain of rapture that changes the world’s flavor. Like Milosz’s earlier work, Roadside Dog is like a scale in whose pans lie horror and beauty. And if beauty almost always triumphs, this is due not to some abstract humanism, some didactic doctrine that might be analyzed by authors of textbooks, but only thanks to the author’s ardent, creative, poetic curiosity, which produces, be it in a poem or a prose note, that something “more,” that extra je ne sais quoi, as the French say, that is poetry.
For Milosz, it is poetry that generates meaning. If Roadside Dog is a soapbox, it is a soapbox for poetry alone (which is served by intelligence and memory). It’s true that Milosz’s work doesn’t lack for doubt, which has its own special niche, but is kept on a chain and not permitted to win in the debate; it is a servant of higher powers. Of course, other forces also come into play. For example, the marvelous sense of humor (which Cioran often lacks) that signals forbearance for the universe’s shortcomings and the imperfection of humans (including the author himself).
Poetry and doubt require one another, they coexist like the oak and ivy, like dogs and cats. But their relationship is neither harmonious nor symmetrical. Poetry needs doubt far more than doubt needs poetry. Through doubt, poetry purges itself of rhetorical insincerity, senseless chatter, falsehood, youthful loquacity, empty (inauthentic) euphoria. Released from doubt’s stern gaze, poetry—especially in our dark days—might easily degenerate into sentimental ditties, exalted but unthinking song, senseless praise of all the earth’s forms.
Things stand differently with doubt: it flees the company of poetry. Poetry is its dread opponent, or more, a fatal threat. Even dark, tragic poetry rises above doubt, annihilates it, annuls its reason for being. Doubt enriches and dramatizes poetry, but poetry liquidates doubt—or at least so dilutes it that the skeptics lose their heads and fall silent, or else become artists.
Doubt is more intelligent than poetry, insofar as it tells malicious tales about the world, things we’ve long known but struggled to hide from ourselves. But poetry surpasses doubt, pointing to what we cannot know.
Doubt is narcissistic; we look at everything critically, including ourselves, and perhaps that comforts us. Poetry, on the other hand, trusts the world, and rips us from the deep-sea diving suits of our “I”; it believes in the possibility of beauty and its tragedy.
Poetry’s argument with doubt has nothing in common with the facile quarrel of optimism and pessimism.
The twentieth century’s great drama means that we now deal with two kinds of intellect: the resigned and the seeking, the questing. Doubt is poetry for the resigned. Whereas poetry is searching, endless wandering.
Doubt is a tunnel, poetry is a spiral.
Doubt prefers to shut, while poetry opens.
Poetry laughs and cries, doubt ironizes.
Doubt is death’s plenipotentiary, its longest and wittiest shadow; poetry runs toward an unknown goal.
Why does one choose poetry while another chooses doubt? We don’t know and we’ll never find out. We don’t know why one is Cioran and the other is Milosz.
1997
9 Vacation’s End
Vacation! What a lovely word! I’ve come to value its charm all the more since I realized that it didn’t mean anything to many of my American friends and acquaintances. The Puritan workaholism that dominates the States doesn’t allow for luxuries like real vacations. Why? I’ve asked my American friends about this many times. The answer I often get is that while we’re away on vacation we run the risk of letting our competitors take advantage of our absence. Not directly perhaps, it’s not that we’ll be fired. But they’ll work nonstop through even the summer’s worst dog days and get ahead of us in ways we won’t be able to undo come winter.
It all reminds me, paradoxically, of the slim books full of Thomistic wisdom written by the German philosopher Josef Pieper, who died not long ago at a truly biblical age. In the 1950s, when an almost Stakhanovite work ethic prevailed in Germany, he perversely and courageously championed the Latin otium, that is, serene, aimles
s, unhurried meditation. Vacation would seem to be both a natural continuation and a crucial modification of otium. Otium is linked by and large with motionless study; when I read about otium, I think of a room with books, an armchair, and albums of reproductions. Vacation, on the other hand, involves travel (even if only to the summer house where you’ll continue your studies). Vacation is travel, and travel is necessarily accompanied by an abundance of minor, annoying indignities. The crucial immobility that resides in the heart of otium vanishes the day before you leave; the circling around a suitcase while bearing it various offerings from your closet becomes a parody of vacation mobility. We’re still further distanced from otium’s stasis by the trip itself, regardless of whether it is undertaken by car, train, horse, or bus.
The journey, or the possibility of one, is not simply a function of material wealth, I should add. The United States is far wealthier than my meager Central European homeland, but when we go to Krakow in August almost all our friends are out of town. There’d be no danger of that in New York. Or almost none.
Returning to the phenomenology of vacations: the trip explodes the serenity of otium, it tears us from our favorite books. (Or rather from our choice of bedtime reading—how many books can you take on the road? And who knows if you’ll want to keep faith with the authors you picked up while packing?) But the trip, to do it justice, also reveals the limits of this famous otium. Staying in your room—the state Pascal praised so highly—can lead at times to sterility, to a specific type of stale, bookish egotism. Books are marvelous company—but the world also merits our attention. On journeys, though, as in dreams, we meet new people and old buildings, we’re introduced to places we’ve never seen. But dreams ordinarily deceive us; dream voices speak too hurriedly, as though fearing the dawn’s arrival. Our little memories can’t manage whatever it is that dreams whisper so insistently. Whereas a successful trip takes the shape of an expanded and well-ordered dream. And a prolonged one; even the shortest trip (I’m not counting flying, which has nothing in common with traveling, it’s more like short-term hibernation) is slower than a dream, and more comprehensible.
Trips remind us that we read too much, that rich fields of reality spread beyond the library. They summon up the great pleasures of walking, long treks through Italian towns, where we try to stay on the shady side of the street to avoid the ruthless sun. They revive thirst’s sweet torment, quenched by a long sip of acqua senza gas. In other words, a trip—as long as it’s as individualized as possible, not subject to anyone’s orders, not restricted by the tour bus driver’s suggestions—reawakens the bookworm to his body’s presence, its indispensability not just for sports but for art, especially for art. In a certain sense the tiredness we experience during a zealous trip to one of those countries worth visiting echoes the physical exhaustion of the artist-craftsmen who put frescoes into church vaults and wrenched white statues from marble. It also mimics their own mobility and their own arduous journeys from town to town and patron to patron. They relocated, after all, on horse- or donkey-back, or even on foot. (Even in the nineteenth century young artists often covered long distances on foot; you don’t often encounter pedestrians today on the road between Warsaw and Krakow.)
During the course of our travels we see people we’d never find in our hometown. At times a local will answer our banal question—“How do I get to such and such a cathedral?”—with such verve that he stays lodged in our memory by way of the charm he imparts to his simple directions: prima a destra, seconda a sinistra. Even the word sinistra loses the ominous ring it has in other languages.
Someone else will sit next to us in a café. We’ll exchange a few words with yet another. We should remember that these meetings—if they become true meetings—are a premium, a bonus thrown in by the good spirits of traveling.
Should we travel alone or in company? Opinions are divided. In his essay “Going on a Journey,” William Hazlitt insists that traveling be done solo: “I like to go by myself.” He quotes Laurence Sterne, who said, “I need a traveling companion in order to observe how the shadows lengthen at sunset.” Hazlitt appreciates the poetic quality of Sterne’s argument, but doesn’t agree, since, so he claims, the constant exchange and comparison of opinions while traveling hinders the spontaneous reactions of the mind, which should remain alone with an alien world.
But my sympathies lie with Sterne for many reasons, not least because on foreign soil you’re alone even when you are with someone else. During an Italian passeggiata or corso, for example, when all the inhabitants of a small town perform their ritual stroll along a precisely prescribed route as if under hypnosis or sleepwalking: new arrivals from distant lands don’t register at all, they’re completely invisible. The tourist has so little reality that traveling with at least one companion fortifies us, braces us a bit. Of course, this company must be carefully selected. Wasn’t it Samuel Johnson who said that the pleasantest thing was to find oneself in a coach with a pretty, intelligent woman?
We admired one such passeggiata this year on the streets of Lucca: the elderly, the middle-aged, young mothers proudly pushing baby carriages, groups of girls in their best T-shirts and crowds of laughing boys pretending not to notice, peeking slyly at one another. Such varied generations strolling beside one another through the evening streets seems at times like a bizarre metaphysical joke. It’s as if time were mocking us, showing us human destiny, or rather, one human fate presented simultaneously (or synchronically, as a half-baked structuralist might say), magnified, multiplied many times over. If so, then the infant, the teenager, the sober middle-aged father, and the grandfather perched on a brick wall would all be one person, the same inhabitant of Lucca! Likewise all the women, from the little girl to the gray-haired, garrulous old lady, would be merely the multiplication of a single woman.
One inconvenience of nearly every trip, however, is that it strips us of music. You can’t count on concerts waiting at every stop along the road; and the many summer music festivals may not prove particularly enticing. Their audiences aren’t made up of travelers, moreover, but of those who stay in one place. But anyone who wants to experience the pleasures of a renewed acquaintance with music come September will agree to a few weeks of fasting. You may even be better off not bringing along one or another portable player—there are so many nowadays—so as to experience a true musical famine, unsated by pale imitations.
Lucca. Muratov described it as poor, provincial, and neglected back at the turn of the century, but it’s a prosperous, seemingly complacent town today. Its famous fortifications, which haven’t had anything to fend off for ages, serve locals and tourists alike as a splendid park and walkway both around and beyond the town; you come across bicyclists, strolling couples, local joggers, and American students gazing at Italy with eyes wide open. The good fortune of Lucca, which has apparently profited both from tourism and from Italy’s economic miracle, seems so great that we mistrust our own senses when we spot the prison—gloomy and gray like all prisons, illuminated with trembling neon light—from the fortications one evening. How can happy Lucca, which was governed, apparently quite well, for several years by Elisa Bonaparte, the usurper’s sister, have a prison? But it does.
Lucca doesn’t differ much from other Tuscan towns. But if you stay on a bit longer, carefully observing its homes and churches, you’ll discover—yet again!—the manifest, remarkable Italian talent for architectural detail, that frantic gift for shaping little piazzas, decorating walls, erecting glorious churches.
Lucca holds one particularly distinctive square—the Piazza dell’ Anfiteatro—which retains the exact shape of a Roman amphitheater. This must be one of the most unusual ways ever used to preserve the past—the amphitheater is no longer there, but the square serves as its negative, its imprint. The small stones with concave frontals covered in pastel plaster evoke the Romans’ presence. This oval expanse was uncovered only in the nineteenth century; earlier it had been overgrown with hovels, and before that, centuries a
go, the amphitheater’s Roman marble had been stripped by local builders who used it to construct Lucca’s churches. Its shrines thus arose in some sense from the weather-beaten sporting passions of the ancient Romans. Today, though, this square good-humoredly reconciles everyday Italian life with the onslaught of tourists; motley laundry dries on the balconies while a tired tourist from Arizona naps in the café garden. One balcony in particular, the highest, crowns the amphitheater’s western pole and reigns over the square: a mass of gorgeous flowers spills from it.
Lucca gives the impression of being homogeneous; the ancient fortifications that frame it reinforce the sense that a fragment of the distant past has been miraculously preserved. But our strolls through the old town, especially on July afternoons, took place in a vacuum (only at dusk did the streets come to life). The town’s inhabitants seemed to have fled. They’d left, no doubt, for the nearby beaches—Lucca isn’t far from the famous seaside resorts of Livorno, where the poet Slowacki sat out his quarantine, Viareggio, or Forte dei Marmi. So the northern visitors were tempted by the seaside too. Sightseeing one day, swimming the next, we decided. Not in Viareggio, though, or Forte dei Marmi, where thin, dreary beaches preside over water so shallow that it seems more like the Dead Sea than the Mediterranean, a bit further, beyond the border dividing Tuscany from Liguria, in Bocca di Magra, a small town set in a somewhat different landscape.
The road to Bocca leads along the coast and calls to mind a corridor in a very long apartment, a corridor crossed every moment by someone in slippers, a damp towel, and dripping hair. Young people on the ubiquitous scooters and motorbikes, as if transposed from an Italian neorealist film, hurriedly surmount the distance from beach to home, home to beach. All these never-ending beaches are thronged, besieged, as if the Italian population counted some two billion. A sign for “Shelley’s Restaurant” juts out beside the highway—a reminder that the nearby town of Lerici holds the last home of the English poet, who drowned when a storm flooded his sailboat. (Unlike Byron, Shelley couldn’t swim; to this day poets are divided into those who swim and those who stay out of the water.)