64
PARTISAN REVIEW
are quarreling and one of them is sixty percent right that's wonderful. If
he is seventy-five percent right, well, that's suspicious or suspect. But if he's
one hundred percent right you know that he's a lout, a thief, and a robber.
I'm sure I won't be one hundred percent right in what [ say here.
Milosz is like the Pacific Ocean: it looks wonderful but you can drown
in it. For instance, in 1980 someone offered me a book published by the
underground of the Nazi occupation in Poland-a small book by Jacques
Maritain,
DOWII the Roads of Defeat.
It had been translated for the anti-Nazi
underground by Czeslaw Milosz. This book also appeared as one of the
first publications under martial law in Poland in 1981.
It's dangerous to talk about Milosz. It's too easy to fall into the trap of
symbols. He is associated with everything for everybody. Poles are
Catholics, and therefore have to have a holy trinity. So in 1980 we first had
the Pope, then we had Walesa, and there was a need for a third. Then, a good
Jewish god who loves Poland saw to it that Milosz got the Nobel Prize. This
is the empirical proof that those who believe in the holy trinity are right.
In the last issue of
Zeszty Literackie,
there's a short statement by
Wojciech Karpinski stating that that it's a great pleasure to live in the era of
Milosz. I believe that too. At the same time, I am aware that one could cre–
ate a huge anthology based on pamphlets and pieces of journalism written
against Milosz, titled
Fro/ll the J;J;Orks
<if
Polish Paralloia.
And this is typical of
Milosz's fate. He's a poet of great suffering. Great harm and unfairness befell
him from his countrymen. I would say , to use Adam Zagajewski's expres–
sion, that he is a poet of solidarity and solitude. It's not easy for me to talk
about al I this in his presence.
The Captive Mind
is a controversial book. For
some, it's a de-masking and accusing book. For others, it's a book outlining
the base and deceptive nature of communism, a book written at a desk to
justifY the fear and the moral compromises of intellectuals who served
despotism out of self-interest. For me, it is first and foremost a testimony of
those tin'les. But it's also a warning for all of us in post-Communist Eastern
Europe. This tale, the story of the mind enslaved by communism, reaches a
specific actuality and relevance when the mind is threatened on the one side
by nihilism and on the other by anti-conU11Unism. [n
The Captive Milld,
Milosz says that those who now sleep in their beds or give themselves up to
idiotic entertainments in the face of the horrors of the world, through every
one of their acts, earn destruction. I think that this book still addresses these
people today. (There is always a majority of them in my country.)
Yesterday, we spoke about the Indonesian poet who found
The Captive
Mind
the best description of the situation of the Indonesian intellectual.
When I was talking about it to Heinrich Boll in 1977, he said that when he
read it during the Cold War it seemed to him one of the many products of
the fear of communism. In 1977, the book seemed like an accurate
