BOOKS
697
INTELLECTUALS UNDER THE "SYSTEM"
THE CAPTIVE MIND.
By
Czeslow Milosz. Knopf. $3.50.
"A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an
embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight:
the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The
bullets hitting against their edges displace and tilt them. Such moments
in the consciousness of a man
judge
all poets and philosophers.... The
vision of the cobblestones is unquestionably real, and poetry based on
an equally
naked
experience could survive triumphantly that judgment
day of man's illusions. In the intellectuals who lived through the atroci–
ties of war in Eastern Europe there took place what one might call the
elimination of emotional luxuries.
... They are hungry- but what they
want is bread, not hors d'oeuvres. Dialectical materialism awakens a re–
sponse in them because it is
earthy.
They would willingly espouse a
literature and art born outside the sphere of the Method, but on con–
dition that it be earthy, strong, and hgalthy.
If
only they could find it!"
Czeslaw Milosz's
The Captive M ind
is entirely written from the
point of view of the man "lying under machine-gun fire on a street" and
looking at the cobblestones: the
naked
reality. In the preceding para–
graph, he had said, "The work of human thought
should
withstand the
test of brutal, naked reality.
If
it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only
those things are worthwhile which can preserve their validity in the
eyes of a man threatened with instant death."
What can these things be for a modem man, a man who finds him–
self by definition in an "extreme situation"? Only two: the first is a
comprehensive system that accounts in terms of concrete, material neces–
sity for the machine-gun fire, the battle, its causes, its stakes, the future
that lies beyond them; the second is the irrational, the "emotional life
of man" (as Milosz puts it in the last pages of the book); something
that no such system can account for, or exhaust, only suppress or disre–
gatti, as an "emotional luxury" precisely. Traditional religion, traditional
culture, and the systems of philosophy are of no avail simply because
there is no apparent transition from the naked particular experience to
them; they do not throw any direct light on the event, offering, so to
speak, only hypothetical hypotheses.
A Polish intellectual, an outstanding poet, and a member of the un–
derground during the war, Czeslaw Milosz, when Poland became a
People's Democracy, tried to come to terms with "naked reality" and
even with the Diamat (dialectical materialism as an
instrumentum regni,
