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PARTISAN REVIEW
epic? What are the major lessons of the twentieth century? The fact that
we have survived it does not lend any sense to the adventure. Can one
have a life that makes sense in a history that makes none?
The eighties have come to an end, and as we enter the mysterious
nineties we must bear in mind their great riddle: are we in a position to
celebrate the second millennium, grateful for being, for being able to be,
for holding our ground in this vale of torment and fallibility where we
bore or beguile our God according to our moods and lights?
The twentieth century is coming to an end. It has been a century of
aggression and irresponsibility. Its follies, its cataclysmic follies stream out
of books and mass graves. No writer, no politician, no public figure is
innocent. No one may level accusations, but no one is released from re–
morse. Remorse, the consciousness of guilt, goes hand in hand with re–
sponsibility . Shouldering responsibility for the future implies shouldering
responsibility for the past. Weak men take weak men's places.
What did the lack of responsibility consist of? The bloating of thin–
skinned collective egos. What did it lead to? Wars and dictatorships. One
or another of the collective egos would take to expanding aggressively
and with self-righteous fervor, wounding its neighbors' sensibilities,
claiming the right to rule, sullying air and water, and bombing perfidi–
ously, while explaining away gas chambers and labor camps with win–
some arguments and proclaiming its own supremacy on the basis of vari–
ous world-historical or world-geographical missions.
All my arguments can be torn to pieces, I know, but I have a very
personal disease: I am an optimist. Why? I see a number of determined
individuals working hard to make this country work, make way not for
tricksters and con men but for movers and shakers (this is their time and
of course a time for the foundations that support them); I see fewer
cowed subjects waiting for the king to provide. The government has
made considerable progress if it has learned to ban less. And it has. All
things considered, I feel we have less reason to fear than we had last year
at this time.
The dour anxiety so characteristic of the citizen of the socialist state
is still an integral element of the post-communist citizen, but its causes
have changed. People feel obliged to take an alarmist view of things.
Everything can be talked about openly now, of course, and because the
more inflated the view the more attention it attracts, there are those
who have turned scare tactics to their advantage. Yet even people who
paint the most apocalyptic pictures on their walls in the dead of night
go to work the next morning. And since more and more people aspire
