ZAGAJEWSKI
405
of immersion, we suddenly bob to the surface and find ourselves
stranded in a kind of no-man's-land. The friendly, ardent flames of
imagination have abandoned us, but we don't yet stand on the solid
ground of everyday common sense. We're suspended for an instant
between two spheres that probably converge at some point, but we have
no idea where (not in us and not for us). It's a treacherous moment; any–
one who starts making lunch or dinner at such a time must take care not
to precipitate a fire or even an earthquake.
THE MOST ABSORBING QUESTIONS are those we can't answer. Who is
man, and by what miracle is he able to transplant his life from one era
to the next, from one system to another? And who am I, since I too
passed through that sorry era-and I can scarcely claim to have emerged
unscathed, calm and pure, internally whole, mature, heroic, uncompro–
mising, uninfected by alien ideas. Now, in hindsight, my defeats and
weaknesses defy belief. Could that really have been me? A lecturer at the
Institute of Social Sciences, whose goal (the institute's, that is) was
unquestionably the ideological bridling of every student to attend the
Academy of Mining and Metallurgy. I lectured on the history of philos–
ophy, but my subject was officially called "The Foundations of Marxist
Philosophy." My students and I read excerpts from Plato (the defense of
Socrates or the allegory of the cave), Descartes's
Meditations,
in which
that disembodied philosopher actually describes his fireplace and the
room in which he works, Kant, Hegel, the existentialists. Sometimes we
didn't even make it to Marx, who-in defiance of chronology!-was
supposed to crown and conclude the millenniaI efforts of European phi–
losophy. All the same, I belonged-in name at least-to the army of
hirelings sent to subjugate the students' minds.
ONCE, BACK WHEN I STILL LIVED in Gliwice, I dropped in at a bookstore
that occasionally stocked books and records from the West. I was about
sixteen and devoted to classical music, though I knew next to nothing
about it. But I longed to learn more. That day the bookstore happened
to have a rarity in stock: Beethoven's complete symphonies under the
direction of Herbert von Karajan. They were Deutsche Grammophon
recordings with lovely, gleaming covers that featured photographs of
von Karajan. The packaging alone was enough to make them art;
