CZESLAW MILOSZ
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books, even though historical experience does transform our
reading.) By experience I mean not only feeling the direct pressure
of History, with a capital
H,
in the form of fire falling from the sky,
invasions by foreign armies, or ruined cities. Historicity may reveal
itself in a detail of architecture, in the shaping of a landscape, even
in trees like those oaks close to my birthplace which remember my
pagan ancestors. Yet only an awareness of the dangers menacing
what we love allows us to sense the dimension of time and to feel in
everything we see and touch the presence of past generations.
I was born and grew up on the very borderline between Rome
and Byzantium. Is it possible-one cannot help asking-to invoke
today those ancient, no more than symbolic, powers? And yet that
division has persisted for centuries, tracing a line, though not always
on the map, between the domain of Roman Catholicism and that of
Eastern Christianity. For centuries Europe maintained that old
division and submitted to the law of parallel axes, a Western one
which extended north from Italy and an Eastern one extending
north from Byzantium. On my side of the border everything came
from Rome: Latin as the language of the church and of literature,
the theological quarrels of the Middle Ages, Latin poetry as a model
for the Renaissance poets, white churches in the baroque style. Also
it was to the South, to Italy, that admirers of arts and letters directed
their longings. Now, as I try to say something sensible about poetry,
these are far from abstract considerations.
If
one of my themes will
be the strange fate of the religious imagination, as well as the fate of
poetry when it began to acquire features of a substitute religion, it is
precisely because in the
Gymnasium
for several years I studied the
history of the Roman church and dogmatics from thick textbooks
that have since been abandoned everywhere; I doubt whether such
detailed books are used now even in seminaries. Also classicism, the
subject of both my fascination and my dislike, has its origin in
Horace, Vergil, and Ovid, whom I read and translated in class. In
my lifetime Latin disappeared from the liturgy and from high-school
curricula, as a result of a gradual weakening of the South-North
axis. It would be too early, however, to relegate Rome and
Byzantium to the irretrievable past, since their heritage constantly
takes on new forms, often difficult to define .
I certainly felt a sense of menace from the East very early, and
not from Eastern Christianity, of course, but from what had arisen
as a result of its defeat. The law of the South-North axis was at work
