ZAGAJEWSKI
403
I CAN'T WRITE KRAKOW'S HISTORY, even though its people and ideas,
trees and walls, cowardice and courage, freedom and rain all involve
me. Ideas as well, since they cling to our skin and change us impercep–
tibly. The Zeitgeist chisels our thoughts and mocks our dreams. I'm
intrigued by all kinds of walls; the space we inhabit isn't neutral, it
shapes our existence. Landscapes enter our innermost being, they leave
traces not just on our retinas but on the deepest strata of our personal–
ities. Those moments when the sky's blue-gray suddenly stands revealed
after a downpour stay with us, as do moments of quiet snowfall. And
ideas may even join forces with the snow, through our senses and our
body. They cling to the walls of houses. And later the houses and bod–
ies, the senses and ideas all vanish. But I can't write Krakow's history, I
can on ly try to reclaim a few moments, a few places and events; a few
people I liked and admired, and a few that I despised.
I'M
NOT AHISTORIAN, but I'd like literature to assume, consciously and
in all seriousness, the function of a historical chronicle. I don't want it
to follow the example set by modern historians, cold fish by and large,
who spend their lives in vanquished archives and write in an inhuman,
ugly, wooden, bureaucratic language from which all poetry's been dri–
ven, a language flat as a wood louse and petty as the daily paper. I'd like
it to return to earlier examples, maybe even Greek, to the ideal of the
historian-poet, a person who has either seen and experienced what he
describes for himself, or has drawn upon a living oral tradition, his fam–
ily's or his tribe's, who doesn't fear engagement and emotion, but who
cares nonetheless about his story's truthfulness.
We are in fact witnessing a revival of literature that serves this very
purpose, but almost no one's paid attention: writers' journals, memoirs,
poets' autobiographies harken back to an archaic literary tradition, the
writing of history from the viewpoint of a sovereign individual and not
an assistant professor, a slave to modish methodologies, a state employee
who must flatter simultaneously both the powers that be and the reign–
ing Parisian epistemology. Examples? Here's a sampling: the autobiogra–
phies of Edwin Muir, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, among other
poets, the essays of Hubert Butler, Nicola Chiaromonte, the notebooks
of Jozef Czapski, Albert Camus...the sketches of Zbigniew Herbert,
Jerzy Stempowski, of Boleslaw Micinski, ill with tuberculosis. Here are
