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PARTISAN REVIEW
are the only possibilities in Dostoyevsky's work-no real contact between
individuals. They can on ly speak using God as a telephone exchange, not
directly. Distance between the two individuals is too great in Dostoyevsky:
God must give you the number. He spoke of the philosopher Lev Shestov,
and the world of blind deternunism. For him , peace of mind was suspect,
since the earth we live on does not predispose us to it. To bow or rebel?
And in the name of what? [s there any valid reason to oppose necessi ty?
God is omnipo tent and free to do anything. Finally, he lectured on Simone
Weil, for whom the main enemy of religion is worshipping the false god,
society. The devil is social, and Milosz noted that the Nobel was unfortu–
nately an example of a very social aspect of art.
My presence here today has a dual purpose: to represent the students,
and to chronicle Milosz the professor, through five undergraduate courses
he taught between 1979 and the spring of 198 I-Contemporary Polish
Poetry and Fiction, The Polish Theater, Dostoyevsky, and Polish
Intell ectual Trends Pre- and Post-1848. [ took what might be the most
complete, most obsessive-compulsive set of notes you 're ever likely to come
across. Fortunately they are full of direct quotes, though unfortunately fil–
tered through the mind of a perhaps typical Berkeley undergrad, circa 1979.
Milosz commented in a lecture on Gombrowicz that he was surprised,
given the difference in form, that he and his students cou ld communicate.
What shape must the lecture take in the minds of those who hear it? Joan
Didion portrays herself as a child of California; but as a fifth-generation
Californian with a past and a history, she is an anomaly. The true child of
California is first generation, not fifth. Milosz has referred to America as "a
country of exiles." California is clearly a state of exiles within that country. My
parents left what history they had in other parts of this country in the 1950s
and never looked back. I found out my mother spoke Spanish as her first lan–
guage when [ was twenty-five, because I happened to see a local newscast in
which she was translating for some visiting Guatemalan nuns. [ discovered my
paternal grandmother was born in Poland when [ was thirty, long after I'd
made several trips to that country. [n my home, first in Los Angeles and later
in Bakersfield, there were few books and poetry came on greeting cards. There
were lots of religious icons, both plastic and juvenile. Mass was held in the
gym
of the local high school. History came &om textbooks and television. [n fact,
the teachers at my high school relied heavily on docudramas to supplement
their teachings. And to this day, Disneyland serves as my only childhood point
of reference for all types of historical buildings, /Tom castles to town halls.
By the time [ transferred from the Claremont Colleges to Berkeley [
knew that something crucial was missing from my educational experience.
[t was then that [ read
The Captive Mi/ld
at the urging of my close friend
Fred Jacobs, who'd studied it in Hannah Arendt's course at Berkeley in the
