CZESLAW MILOSZ
Themes
Carrying a Splinter
Every year he would ponder what he had been spared, and that was
enough to give him happiness. For when he illegally crossed the border,
the same thing could have happened to him, that befell a classmate of his
from the Sigismundus Augustus High School, who was to spend sixteen
years in the gulags. Indeed, a leading motive of his long life has been imag–
ining the fate of his Wilno peers in the labor camps and mines of Vorkuta,
though the authors of his biographies were not aware of this. He identi–
fied himself with prisoners of polar night and hence his ecstatic gratitude
for every sunrise and every slice of bread. Yet precisely because of this he
carried a splinter of resentment towards the so-called people of the West.
He was unable to forgive not only their intellectuals, always on the look–
out for a perfect tyranny, provided it was far from their homes, but also all
the citizens of those countries, united by their common refusal to know.
He asked himself, though, what to do with this splinter. The most
honest behavior would have been to take upon oneself the task of publicly
proclaiming the truth. Unfortunately, the Empire of the Lie was powerful,
and simple-minded collectors of facts could not do anything against it,
since their terrifYing revelations were branded as madmen's hallucinations.
Thus a more clever tactic was needed. Some bearers of the splinter would
decide to serve the Empire, to take in that manner a revenge on the vil–
lainous politicians of the West. He, however, after many hesitations, chose
something else. He learned to pretend for years that he, as befits a wor–
shipper of the intellect, was cultured, progressive, tolerant, permissive, until
he became one of their luminaries, even while he carried his knowledge
which he would not reveal. And when his books gained fame and the
analyses were written, no literary critic would guess that behind their
philosophical meditations stood the image of sufferings crying to Heaven
for vengeance. Only the memory of Vorkuta prisoners
could
provide an
unshakable measure to distinguish good from evil, and whoever applied it
was more dangerous to the monster State than regiments and armies.
Coming Off
What I am going to say will be understood by those of us who have
lived such a moment: for instance during an historical upheaval, when the
life of a human society suddenly reveals its unsuspected traits. Since there
have been in this century a number of historical upheavals, many people
