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Friday, October 01, 2004
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WAT
UD will take advantage of all the post-presidential debate Treblinka/Lubyanka chatter this morning to recommend vociferously the essay "Reading Proust in Lubyanka," by Aleksander Wat, in Four Decades of Polish Essays, edited by Jan Kott (Northwestern University Press, 1990). Here's a sample: The pendulum of prison time swings between agony and nothingness, but in Lubyanka time has other laws and moves in a different way. [B]ooks brought us back to life, immersed us in the life of free people in the great and free world. We took fictional reality naively, like children listening to fairy tales. Could that have been the reason they gave us books in that laboratory of prison existence, where every detail had been thought out, quite possibly even by Stalin himself? Perhaps the experience of two such antithetical realities is supposed to induce a schizophrenic dissociation in a prisoner, rendering him defenseless against the investigation. Could this be one means by which the investigator fires the desire to live, which is otherwise extinguished in a prison? I had a great desire to live, because I found Nietzsche's amor fati in every trifle in every book, even the pessimistic ones. The more pessimism in the book, the more pulsating energy, life energy, I felt beneath its surface - as if all of literature were only the praise of life's beauty, of all of life, as if nature's many charms were insufficient to dissuade us from suicide, from Ecclesiastes, and from Seneca's 'better not to have been born at all but, if born, better to die at once.' I came across books that I had read before prison and that had sapped me of my will. For example, Notes from the Underground. But there in my cell even those books sang hosannas. |