September 3, 1987

July 1944. Hot. Warsaw, after almost five years of occupation, wears a smile, as carefree as only it can be; the walls of its apartment houses are pocked where hostages were executed on street corners; its central districts no longer exist, transformed into the wasteland of the ghetto destroyed by the Germans. What a cheerful city, observing with a stifled giggle the hurried evacuation of the enemy’s offices, the loading onto trucks of wardrobes, trunks, suitcases. Swallows in the pure blue sky, the women’s flowered outfits, the laughter and shouts of boys in the couryards hosing each other down, leaping into improvised swimming pools. So, the end of the war is in sight. After so many deaths, let the living enjoy the sun, the greenery, straining their ears to catch the rumbling of the approaching front.

How many inhabitants of this city understand that this is not a victory, but rather the total, utter defeat of a country that resisted invasion and then continued the struggle for years, on land, on the sea, in the air, and here in the “underground state”? How many of them are capable of differentiating appearances from reality? That country, such as it was, will never exist again, even though it lasted until the moment when the heavy guns of the army from the East could be heard.

***

November 8, 1987

  I would like to read a novel about the twentieth century; not one of those allegories in which human affairs are depicted metaphorically, but a novel, a report about many characters and their actions. It would have to be an international novel, since the century is international, despite the rise of all sorts of nationalisms. I cannot find such a novel, so it would be necessary to write it – and I am curious as to whether there is someone, somewhere, who feel capable of creating it. The currently fasionable narrative techniques – in the first person and about oneself – are an obstacle. It would have to be a panorama employing representative characters, as in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. And the heroes should not be ordinary, gray; on the contrary, they would be modeled on colorful, exceptional personalities – there is no lack of such people. I would choose Rome as the setting, or a monastery such as Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky, for example, which people of all professions and outlooks used to come to in order to visit with Thomas Merton. Thomas Merton himself, with his conflicting desires, might appear in the novel, not only debating the philosphy of Duns Scotus with Maritain (who was one of those who visited Merton), but also thrashing about politically. In Rome, a model of considerable stature would be Cardinal Poupard. His views on the state of faith of Catholics, especially of the clergy, which I heard him express in company, were so bleak that they made me uncomfortable. For a philosopher, someone modeled on Leszek Kolakowski could appear in Rome or Gethsemane. A famous writer would also make an appearance, presumably glued together from several famous names and treated not too kindly – for who, if not writers, allowed themselves to be deceived by stupid ideologues and then excelled in seducing minds?

  The book would not be limited to clashes of views and positions, although the Naphta-Settembrini quarrel in Thomas Mann would be reborn in a new shape. It would not leave out romance; that is, women would have to be brought in. This creates a problem: Why should the female half of the protagonisits be good only for bed? But where are those exceptional intellectual women of the century who are capable of stirring the chronicler’s imagination? There is no doubt that the most famous among them, Simone de Beauvoir, is no credit to the amazons of feminism, and the sooner she is forgotten, the better. She is not suitable as a model because she is of too low a caliber, and we’re not talking about a satire. When she published her novel The Mandarins, a gossipy roman à clef tailored to the dimensions of provincial Paris, I asked Albert Camus if he intended to respond to it. He shrugged his shoulders: “One does not respond to the gutter.” He was right.

  Two exceptional women, both philosophers: Hannah Arendt and Jeanne Hersch. They would deserve to be introduced along with the master they both admired, Karl Jaspers, and in the background, perhaps, the not at all ideologically innocent Heidegger. I met Hannah Arendt through Jeanne in Paris; we had dinner together. But they would have to be described by a contemporary pen, and Hannah Arendt is dead, while I have never even tried to sketch a portrait of Jeanne.

  So, a novel of the life of the higher intellectual spheres, of international congresses like the Rencontres de Genève, the papal seminars to which non-Catholics like Jeanne and Leszek are also invited, or of Vatican circles. One way or another, I consider it to be my privilege that I am able to spin such fantasies, because in this century I have met quite a few famous people, including a number of individuals whom I think of as wise and noble. 

***

  Committed to poetry throughout my entire life, I have had to situate my religious “yes” and “no” within the history of poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. Poetry’s separation from religion has always strengthened my conviction that the erosion of the cosmic-religious imagination is not an illusion and that the vast expanses of the planet that are falling away from Christianity are the external correlative of this erosion. At the same time, the persistent strong presence of Old and New Testament images in the poetry of many countries raises a question about what phase we are in. What is poetry advancing toward – the disappearance of “relics” of their strengthening? The nihilistic foundation of poetry, as of all civilization, doesn’t diminish its role as an organ of “metaphysical” knowledge. For Koninski, the profundity, the richness, the vitality of the cosmos is on God’s side. And that, after all, is exactly what poetry proclaims in defiance of scientific formulas; that is what nourishes poetry, that is what poetry explores.