POETRY
AN D T HE SACR EJ)
87
rounded the building and eventuall y expell ed the occupying students with
considerabl e force. In the aftermath, a com.binati on of student strikes and sim–
ple turmoil brought the life of the university to a halt. Many students wore
ribbons that said , "Shut It Down ." I wore, for one day, a ribbon that said
"Keep Harvard Open," but then I threw it away. The ques tion I was Stl-ug–
gling to formul ate, the ques tion behind the ques tion of "Which side are you
on?" was " How many sides are there?" I wanted there to be more than two.
Because of my European experi ence, I already had been exposed to all the
arguments against American involvement in Vietnam but I couldn't forget the
d.p.'s in Our Lady Help of C hristians pari sh. They weren't fl eeing nothing. In
the furor over Vietnam , no one seemed any longer to be thinking about
Eas tern Europe. I said to anyone who would li sten that we should withdraw
from Vietnam because the war there was weakening us for the struggle against
worldwide communi sm, but no one would li sten; as fo r my membership in
the Jesuits or in the C hurch, as for the Bibl e that I was studying so intensely,
they al l seemed to have no connection whatsoever to any of these events.
And then in the agitation of thi s moment I came upon two caLTung and
clarifYing wo rks of art. O ne was Bernardo Bertolucci's film
B~fore
the
Revoilltion.
The o ther was Czeslaw Milosz's
11,e Captive Mind.
I read
The
Captive Mil/d
at a gulp and understood its characterizati ons of the vari eties of
sacr[(icillill il/tel/cetlls
with embarrassing ease. What helped more, however, was
Milosz's determinati on to understand what had attracted him and so many of
hi s generati on to cOl1lmuni slll . O nly by unders tanding that could he deter–
mine what hi s future
commitmen t~
would have to be. As the moment neared
when I would leave the Jesuits, I was in an analogous situation. I needed to
understand what had attracted me to the o rder so that I could determine what
my fu ture commitments should be. l3ut thi s was only the begilming of the
compli cati on, for I was retreating fj-Olll that to whi ch Milosz in
The Captive
i\!{illd
had seemed to be adva ncing. Whatever the formal similariti es, was I a
pobti cal as well as a religious deserter? It mattered to me that Milosz was Polish
and, I inferred, Catholi c o r a Catholi c fellow-travel ler. One develops a kind of
instinct about these things, and speaking with Illo re perspicacity than I had at
the time, he was in a positi on to do for ethni c Catholics (as we call them in
Ameri ca) and even fo r po li ti cal conservatives what
Partisan ReviellJ
had long
been doing fo r Jews, "Yankees," and poli tical liberals. For them,
Partisall Review
opened a space in whi ch one could be anti-colllmuni st but radical. Befo re
Milosz, no one had very eftectively opened a space in which one could be anti–
fascist but pious, patrioti c, and cul turally conserva tive.
Mil osz helped me take consc ious possession of something I had
brought home fj-om Europe almos t witho ut reali zing it, along with the
memo ry of those brushes wi th
Marxisal/t
Jesui ts. That something was a
background awareness o f a fea ture o f pos t-wa r European politics that
