On Grief and Reason: Essays

ESSAYS Farrar Straus Giroitx

NEW YORK

Copyright © 1995 by Joseph Brodsky

"Homage to Marcus Aurelius," originally published in Cam- pidoglio, is reprinted with permission of Random House, Inc. Text copyright © 1994 by Joseph Brodsky. "Wooing the Inan­imate," originally published as the introduction to The Es­sential Thomas Hardy, is reproduced by permission of The Ecco Press. Introduction copyright © 1995 by Joseph Brodsky.

To Roger W. Straus, with gratitude

Contents

Spoils of War I 3 The Condition We Call Exile I 22 A Place as Good as Any I 35 Uncommon Visage I 44 Acceptance Speech I 59 After a Journey I 62 Altra Ego I 81 How to Read a Book I g6 In Praise of Boredom I 104

Profile of Clio I 114 Speech at the Stadium I 138

Collectors Item I 149 An Immodest Proposal I 198 Letter to a President I 212 On Grief and Reason I 223 Homage to Marcus Aurelius I 267 A Gat's Meow I 299 Wooing the Inanimate I 312 Ninety Years Later I 376 Letter to Horace I 428 In Memory of Stephen Spender I 459

Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self. — W. H. AUDEN

On Grief and Reason

Spoils of War

i

In the beginning, there was canned corned beef. More ac­curately, in the beginning, there was a war, World War II; the siege of my hometown, Leningrad; the Great Hunger, which claimed more lives than all the bombs, shells, and bullets together. And toward the end of the siege, there was canned corned beef from America. Swift, I think, was the brand name, although I may be wrong; I was only four when I tasted it for the first time.

It was perhaps the first meat we had had in a while. Still, its flavor was less memorable than the cans themselves. Tall, square-shaped, with an opening key attached to the side, they heralded different mechanical principles, a dif­ferent sensibility altogether. That key skeining a tiny strip of metal to get the can open, was a revelation to a Russian child: we knew only knives. The country was still nails, ham­mers, nuts, and bolts: that's what held it together, and it was to stay that way for most of our lives. That's why, there and then, nobody could explain to me the sealing method used by these cans' makers. Even today, I don't grasp it fully. Then and there, I'd stare at my mother detaching the key, unbending the little tab and sticking it into the key's eye, and then turning the key time and again around its axis, in sheer bewilderment.

Long after their contents vanished into the cloaca, these tall, somewhat streamlined around the corners (like cinema screens!), dark red or brown cans with foreign lettering on their sides survived on many families' shelves and win- dowsills, partly as aesthetic objects, partly as good containers for pencils, screwdrivers, film rolls, nails, etc. Often, too, they would be used as flowerpots.

We were not to see them ever again—neither their jellied contents nor their shapes. With the passage of years, their value increased: at least they were becoming more and more coveted in schoolboys' trade. For a can like this, one could get a German bayonet, a navy belt buckle, a magnifying glass. Their sharp edges (where the can was opened) cost us many a cut finger. In the third grade, however, I was the proud owner of two of them.

II

If anybody profited from the war, it was us: its children. Apart from having survived it, we were richly provided with stuff to romanticize or to fantasize about. In addition to the usual childhood diet of Dumas and Jules Verne, we had military paraphernalia, which always goes well with boys. With us, it went exceptionally well, since it was our country that won the war.

Curiously enough, though, it was the military hardware of the other side that attracted us most, not that of our own victorious Red Army. Names of German airplanes—Junkers, Stukas, Messerschmidts, Focke-Wulfs—were constantly on our lips. So were Schmeisser automatic rifles, Tiger tanks, ersatz rations. Guns were made by Krupp, bombs were cour­tesy of I. G. Farben-Industrie. A child's ear is always sen­sitive to a strange, irregular sound. It was, I believe, this acoustic fascination rather than any actual sense of danger that attracted our tongues and minds to those words. In spite of all the good reasons that we had to hate the Germans— and in spite of the state propaganda's constant exhortations to that end—we habitually called them "Fritzes" rather than "Fascists" or "Hitlerites." Presumably because luckily we'd never knowi them in any other capacity than as PO\Vs.

Similarly, we saw quite a lot of German military equip­ment in the war museums, which cropped up in the late forties everywhere. Those were our best outings—far better than the circus or the movies; and especially if our demo­bilized fathers were taking us there (those of us, that is, who had fathers). Oddly enough, they were quite reluctant to do so; but they'd answer in great detail our inquiries about the firepower of this or that German machine gun or the types of explosives used in this or that bomb. This reluctance was caused, not by their desire to spare gentle imaginations the horrors of war, or themselves the memories of dead friends and the guilty feeling of being alive. No, they simply saw through our idle curiosity and didn't approve of that.

I I I

Each one of them—our alive fathers, that is—kept, of course, some memento of that war. It could be a set of binoculars (Zeiss!), or a German U-boat officer's cap with appropriate insignia, or an accordion inlaid with mother-of- pearl, or a sterling-silver cigarette case, a gramophone, or a camera. When I was twelve, my father suddenly produced to my great delight a shortwave-radio set. Philips was the name, and it could pick up stations from all over the world, from Copenhagen to Surabaja. At least that was what the names on its yellow dial suggested.

This Philips radio was rather portable—by the standards of the time—a 10-by-14-inch brown Bakelite affair, with said yellow dial and a catlike, absolutely mesmerizing green eye indicating the quality of reception. It had, if I remember things correctly, only six tubes, and two feet of simple wire would do as its aerial. But here was the rub. To have an aerial sticking out of a window could mean only one thing to the police. To try to attach your radio to the building's main antenna required a professional's help, and that profes­sional, in his turn, would pay unneeded attention to your set. One wasn't supposed to have a foreign radio, period. The solution was a web-like arrangement under the ceiling of your room, which is what I made. That way, of course, I couldn't get Radio Bratislava or, moreover, Delhi. But then I knew neither Czech nor Hindi. And as for the BBC, the Voice of America, or Radio Free Europe broadcasts in Rus­sian, they were jammed anyway. Still, one could get pro­grams in English, German, Polish, Hungarian, French, Swedish. I knew none of those languages; but then there was the VOA's Time for Jazz, with the richest-in-the-world bass-baritone of Willis Conover, its disc jockey!

To this brown, shining-like-an-old-shoe Philips set, I owe my first bits of English and my introduction to the Jazz Pantheon. When we were twelve, the German names on our lips gradually began to be replaced by those of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Clifford Brown, Sidney Bechet, Django Reinhardt, and Charlie Par­ker. Something began to happen, I remember, even to our walk: the joints of our highly inhibited Russian frames harkened to "swing." Apparently I was not the only one in my generation who knew how to put two feet of plain wire to good use.

Through six symmetrical holes in its back, in the sub­dued glow and flicker of the radio tubes, in the maze of contacts, resistors, and cathodes, as incomprehensible as the languages they were generating, I thought I saw Europe. Inside, it always looked like a city at night, with scattered neon lights. And when at the age of thirty-two I indeed landed in Vienna, I immediately felt that, to a certain extent, I knew the place. To say the least, falling asleep my first nights in Vienna felt distinctly like being switched off by some invisible hand far away, in Russia.

It was a sturdy machine. When one day, in a paroxysm of anger at my incessant fiddling with various frequencies, my father threw it on the floor, its frame came apart, but it kept receiving. Because I wouldn't dare take it to a profes­sional radio mechanic, I tried to repair that Oder-Neisse- like crack as best I could, using all sorts of glue and rubber bands; but from then on, it existed in the form of two some­what loosely connected bulky halves. Its end came when the tubes gave out, although once or twice I managed to track down their analogues through the grapevine of friends and acquaintances. Yet even when it became just a mute box, it still remained in our family—as long as the family itself existed. In the late sixties, everyone bought a Latvian-made Spidola, with its telescopic antenna and all sorts of transistors inside. Admittedly, it had better reception and was more portable. Still, I saw it once in a repair shop with its back removed. The best I can say about the way it looked inside was that it resembled some geographic map (roads, railroads, rivers, tributaries). It didn't look like anything in particular; it didn't even look like Riga.

8/ JOSEPH BRODSKY

IV

But the greatest spoils of war were, of course, films! There were lots of them, and they were mostly ofHollywood prewar production, with (as we were able to determine two decades later) Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Tyrone Power, Johnny Weissmuller, and others. They were mostly about pirates, Elizabeth I, Cardinal Richelieu, et cetera—nothing to do with reality. The closest they approached to our time was in Waterloo Bridge with Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh. Since our government wasn't keen on paying for the rights, no credits were given and, as a rule, no names ofcharacters or actors either. The show would start in the following fash­ion. The light dimmed, and on the screen, in white letters against a black background, this message would appear: this FILM WAS CAPTURED AS A MILITARY TROPHY IN THE COURSE OF THE GREAT WAR FOR OUR MOTHERLAND. It would flicker there for a minute or so; then the film started. A hand with a candle in it lit up a piece of parchment with the royal PIRATES, Captain blood, or robin hood in Cyrillic on it. That might be followed by an explanatory note indicating time and place of action, also in Cyrillic but often fashioned after Gothic script. Surely this was theft, but we in the audience couldn't care less. For that, we were too absorbed in reading subtitles and following the action.

Perhaps just as well. The absence of who was who on the screen imparted to these films the anonymity of folklore and the air of universality. They held us in greater sway and thrall than all the subsequent output of the neorealists or the nouvelle vague. The absence of credits made them openly archetypal at the time—the early fifties: the last years of Stalin's rule. The Tarzan series alone, I daresay, did more for de-Stalinization than all Khrushchev's speeches at the Twentieth Party Congress and after.

One should take into account our latitudes, our buttoned-up, rigid, inhibited, winter-minded standards of public and private conduct, in order to appreciate the impact of a long-haired naked loner pursuing a blonde through the thick of a tropical rain forest with his chimpanzee version of Sancho Panza and lianas as means of transportation. Add to that the view of New York (in the last bit of the series that was played in Russia), with Tarzan jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge—and almost an entire generation's opting out will become understandable.

The first thing that came in was, of course, the haircut. We all turned long-haired at once. That was immediately followed by stovepipe trousers. Ah, what pains, what sub­terfuge, what effort it cost to convince our mothers/sisters/ aunts to convert our invariably black ballooning postwar pants into straight-leg precursors of yet unknown Levi's! But we were adamant—and so were our detractors: teachers, police, relatives, neighbors, who'd kick us out of school, arrest us on the street, ridicule us, call us names. That's why a man who grew up in the fifties and the sixties despairs today trying to buy a pair of pants; all this ridiculous, fabric- wasting, baggy stuff!

v

There was, ofcourse, something more crucial to these trophy movies; it was their "one-against-all" spirit, totally alien to the communal, collective-oriented sensibility of the society we grew up in. Perhaps precisely because all these Sea Hawks and Zorros were so removed from our reality, they influenced us in a way contrary to that intended. Offered to us as entertaining fairy tales, they were received rather as parables of individualism. What would be regarded by a normal viewer as a costume drama with some Renaissance props was regarded by us as historical proof of individualism's precedence.

Showing humans against the backdrop of nature, a film always has documentary value. Connoting a printed page, a black-and-white film does all the more so. Given our closed, better yet our tightly shut, society, we were thus more in­formed than entertained. With what keenness did we scru­tinize turrets and ramparts, vaults and moats, grilles and chambers that we'd seen on the screen! For we'd seen them for the first time in our lives! So we took all those papier- mache, cardboard Hollywood props for real, and our sense of Europe, of the West, of history, if you will, always owed a great deal to those images. So much so that some among us who later would have landed in the barracks of our penal system frequently improved their diet by retelling plots and remembered details of that West to both guards and fellow inmates who'd never seen those trophy movies.

VI

Among those trophies one could occasionally bump into a real masterpiece. I remember, for instance, That Hamilton Woman with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Also, I seem to recall Gaslight with the then very young Ingrid Bergman. The underground industry was very alert, and in no time one could buy, from a shady character in the public lavatory or in the park, a postcard-sized print of this or that actress or actor. Errol Flynn in his Sea Hawk outfit was my most sacred possession, and for years I tried to imitate the forward thrust of his chin and the autonomous motion of his left eyebrow. With the latter, I failed.

And before the twang ofthis sycophantic note dies away, let me mention here something else—something that I have in common with Adolf Hitler: the great love of my youth, whose name was Zarah Leander. I saw her only once, in what was called, then and there, Road to the Scaffold (Das Herz einer Konigin), a story about Mary, Queen of Scots. I remember nothing about this picture save a scene where her young page rests his head on the stupendous lap of his condemned queen. In my view, she was the most beautiful woman who ever appeared on the screen, and my subse­quent tastes and preferences, valid though they were in themselves, were but deviations from her standard. As at­tempts to account for a stunted or failed romantic career go, this one feels to me oddly satisfactory.

Leander died two or three years ago, I think, in Stock­holm. Shortly before that, a record came out with several Schlagers of hers, among which was a tune called "Die Rose von Nowgorod." The composer's name was given as Rota, and it couldn't be anyone else but Nino Rota himself. The tune beats by far the Lara theme from Doctor Zhivago; the lyrics—well, they are blissfully in German, so I don't bother. The voice is that of Marlene Dietrich in timbre, but the singing technique is far better. Leander indeed sings; she doesn't declaim. And it occurred to me several times that had the Germans listened to that tune, they would not have been in the mood to march nach Osten. Come to think of it, no other century has produced as much schmaltz as ours; perhaps one should pay closer attention to it. Perhaps schmaltz should be regarded as a tool of cognition, especially given the vast imprecision of our century. For schmaltz is flesh of the flesh—a kid brother indeed—of Schmerz. We have, all of us, more reasons for staying than for marching. What's the point in marching if you are only going to catch up with a very sad tune?

12 / J О S E PH B R ODSKY

I suppose my generation was the most attentive audience for all that pre- and postwar dream factories' production. Some of us became, for a while, avid cineastes, but perhaps for a different set of reasons than our counterparts in the West. For us, films were the only opportunity to see the West. Quite oblivious of the action itself, in every frame we tried to discern the contents of the street or of an apartment, the dashboard of the hero's car, the types of clothes worn by heroines, the sense of space, the layout of the place they were operating in. Some of us became quite adept at de­termining the location in which a film was shot, and some­times we could tell Genoa from Naples or, to say the least, Paris from Rome, on the basis of only two or three archi­tectural ensembles. We would arm ourselves with city maps, and we would hotly argue about Jeanne Moreau's address in this film or Jean Marais's in another.

But that, as I said, was to happen much later, in the late sixties. And later still, our interest in films began to fade away, as we realized that film directors were increasingly of our own age and had less and less to tell us. By that time, we were already accomplished book readers, subscribers to Foreign Literature monthly, and we would stroll to the cin­ema less and less willingly, having realized that there is no point in knowing a place you are not going to inhabit. That, I repeat, was to happen much later, when we were in our thirties.

One day, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I sat in the courtyard of a huge apartment complex driving nails into the lid of a wooden box filled with all sorts of geological instruments which were to he shipped to the (Soviet) Far East—where I myself was about to follow, to join my team. It was early May, hut the day was hot and I was bored out of my wits and per­spiring. Suddenly, out of one of the top floor's open windows, came "A-tisket, a-tasket"—the voice was that of Ella Fitz­gerald. Now this was 1955 or 1956, in some grimy industrial outskirt of Leningrad, Russia. Good Lord, I remember thinking, how many records must they have produced for one of them to end up here, in this brick-cum-concrete absolute nowhere, amid not so much drying-up as soot- absorbing bedsheets and lavender underpants! That's what capitalism is all about, I said to myself: winning through excess, through overkill. Not through central planning, but through grapeshot.

IX

I knew the tune, partly because of my radio, partly because in the fifties every city youth had his own collection of so- called bone music. "Bone music" was a sheet of X-ray film with a homemade copy of some jazz piece on it. The tech­nology of the copying process was beyond my grasp, hut I trust it was a relatively simple procedure, since the supply was steady and the price reasonable.

One could purchase this somewhat morbid-looking stuff (speak of the nuclear age!) in the same fashion as those sepia pictures of Western movie stars: in parks, in public toilets, at Hea markets, in the then-famous "cocktail halls," where you could sit on a tall chair sipping a milkshake and think you were in the West.

And the more I think ofit, the more I become convinced that this was the West. For on the scales of truth, intensity of imagination counterbalances and at times outweighs real­ity. On that score, as well as with the benefit of hindsight,

I may even insist that we were the real Westerners, perhaps the only ones. With our instinct for individualism fostered at every instance by our collectivist society, with our hatred toward any form of affiliation, be that with a party, a block association, or, at that time, a family, we were more Amer­ican than the Americans themselves. And if America stands for the outer limit of the West, for where the West ends, we were, I must say, a couple of thousand miles off the West Coast. In the middle of the Pacific.

X

Somewhere in the early sixties, when the power of sugges­tion, headed by garter belts, began its slow exodus from the world, when we found ourselves increasingly reduced to the either/or of pantyhose, when foreigners had already started to arrive in planeloads in Russia, attracted by its cheap yet very sharp fragrance of slavery, and when a friend of mine, with a faintly contemptuous smile on his lips, remarked that perhaps it takes history to compromise geography, a girl I was courting gave me for my birthday an accordionlike set of postcards depicting Venice.

They belonged, she said, to her grandmother, who went to Italy for a honeymoon shortly before World War I. There were twelve postcards, in sepia, on poor quality yellowish paper. The reason she gave them to me was that, at about that time, I was full of two books by Henri de Regnier I'd just finished; both of them had for their setting Venice in winter: Venice thus was then on my lips.

Because the pictures were brownish and badly printed, and because of Venice's latitude and its very few trees, one couldn't tell for sure what season was depicted. People's clothes were of no help, since everyone wore long skirts, felt hats, top hats, bowlers, dark jackets: turn-of-the-century fashions. The absence of color and the general gloom of the texture suggested what I wanted them to suggest: winter, the true time of the year.

In other words, the texture and the melancholy it con­veyed, because so familiar to me in my own hometown, made these pictures more comprehensible, more real. It was al­most like reading relatives' letters. And I read them and reread them. And the more I read them, the more apparent it became that this was what the word "West" meant to me: a perfect city by the winter sea, columns, arcades, narrow passages, cold marble staircases, peeling stucco exposing the red-brick flesh, putti, cherubs with their dust-covered eye­balls: civilization that braced itself for the cold times.

And looking at these postcards, I made a vow that, should I ever get out of my native realm, I'd go in winter to Venice, rent a room on the ground—nay, the water— floor, sit down there, write two or three elegies, extinguish­ing my cigarettes on the damp floor, so that they'd hiss; and when the money was up, I'd purchase not a ticket back but a Saturday-Night Special and blow my brains out on the spot. A decadent fantasy, of course (but if you are not dec­adent at twenty, then when?). Still, I am grateful to the Parcae for allowing me to act out the better part of it. True, history is doing a rather brisk job at compromising geog­raphy. The only way to beat that is to become an outcast, a nomad; a shadow briefly caressing lace-like porcelain colon­nades reflected in crystal water.

xi

And then there was the Renault 2CV that I saw one day parked on an empty street in my hometown, by the Her­mitage's caryatided portico. It looked like a flimsy yet self- contained butterfly, with its folded wings of corrugated iron:

16 I J О S E PH B R О DSKY

the way World War II airfield hangars were and French police vans still are.

I was observing it without any vested interest. I was then just twenty, and I neither drove nor aspired to drive. To have your own car in Russia in those days, one had to be real scum, or that scum's child: a Parteigenosse, an acade­mician, a famous athlete. But even then your car would be only of local manufacture, for all its stolen blueprints and know-how.

It stood there, light and defenseless, totally lacking the menace normally associated with automobiles. It looked as if it could easily be hurt by one, rather than the other way around. I've never seen anything made of metal as unem- phatic. It felt more human than some of the passersby, and somehow it resembled in its breathtaking simplicity those World War II beef cans that were still sitting on my win- dowsill. It had no secrets. I wanted to get into it and drive off—not because I wanted to emigrate, but because to get inside it must have felt like putting on a jacket—no, a raincoat—and going for a stroll. Its side-window flaps alone resembled a myopic, bespectacled man with a raised collar. If I remember things correctly, what I felt while staring at this car was happiness.

xii

I believe my first English utterance was indeed "'His Master's Voice," because one started to learn languages in the third grade, when one was ten, and my father returned from his tour ofduty in the Far East when I was eight. The war ended for him in China, yet his hoard was not so much Chinese as Japanese, because at that end of the story it was Japan that was the loser. Or so it seemed at the time. The bulk of the hoard was records. They sat in massive but quite elegant cardboard albums embossed with gilded Japanese characters; now and then the cover would depict a scantily attired maiden led to a dance by a tuxedoed gent. Each album would contain up to a dozen black shiny disks staring at you through their thick shirts, with their gold-and-red and gold-and-black labels. They were mostly "His Master's Voice" and "Colum­bia"; the latter, however, although easily pronounced, had only letters, and the pensive doggy was a winner. So much so that its presence would influence my choice of music. As a result, by the age of ten I was more familiar with Enrico Caruso and Tito Schipa than with fox-trot and tangos, which also were in abundance, and for which in fact I felt a pre­dilection. There were also all sorts of overtures and classical hits conducted by Stokowski and Toscanini, "Ave Maria" sung by Marian Anderson, and the whole of Cannen and Lohengrin, with casts I no longer recall, though I remember how enthusiastic my mother was about those performances. In fact, the albums contained the whole prewar musical diet of the European middle class, which tasted perhaps doubly sweet in our parts because of the delay in its arrival. And it was brought to you by this pensive doggy, practically in its teeth. It took me at least a decade to realize that "His Mas­ter's Voice" means what it does: that a dog is listening here to the voice of its owner. I thought it was listening to the recording of its own barking, for I somehow took the pho­nograph's amplifier for a mouthpiece too, and since dogs normally run before their owners, this label all my childhood meant to me the voice of the dog announcing his master's approach. In any case, the doggy ran around the world, since my father found those records in Shanghai after the slaughter of the Kwangtong Army. Needless to say, they arrived in my reality from an unlikely direction, and I remember myself more than once dreaming about a long train with black shin­ing records for wheels adorned with "His Master's Voice" and "Columbia," trundling along a rail laid out of words like "Kuomintang," "Chiang Kai-shek," "Taiwan," "Chu Teh"— or were those the railroad stations? The destination was pre­sumably our brown leather gramophone with its chromium- steel handle powered by my measly self. On the chair's back hangs my father's dark blue Navy tunic with its golden epau­lets, on the hat rack there is my mother's silver fox clasping its tail; in the air: "Una furtiva lagrima."

xiii

Or else it could be "La Comparsita"—the greatest piece of music in this century, as far as I am concerned. After this tango, no triumph is meaningful, either your nation's or your own. I've never learned to dance, being both self-conscious and truly awkward, but I could listen to these twangs for hours and, when there was no one around, move. Like many a folk tune, "La Comparsita" is a dirge, and at the end of that war a dirge rhythm felt more suitable than a boogie- woogie. One didn't want acceleration, one craved restraint. Because one vaguely sensed what one was heading for. Put it down, then, to our dormant erotic nature that we clung so much to things that as yet hadn't gone streamline, to the black-lacquered fenders of the surviving German BMWs and Opel-captains, to the equally shining American Packards and bearlike windshield-squinting Studebakers, with their dou­ble rear wheels—Detroit's answer to our all-absorbing mud. A child always tries to get beyond his age, and if one can't picture oneself defending the motherland, since the real defenders are all around, one's fancy may fly one into the incoherent foreign past and land one inside a large black Lincoln with its porcelain-knob-studded dashboard, next to some platinum blonde, sunk to her silk knees in the patent- leather cushions. In fact, one knee would be enough. Some­times, just touching the smooth fender was enough. This comes to you via one of those whose birthplace went up in smoke, courtesy of a Luftwaffe air raid, from one of those who tasted white bread for the first time at the age of eight (or, if this idiom is too foreign for you, Coca-Cola at thirty- two). So put this down to that dormant eroticism and check in the yellow pages where they certify morons.

xiv

There was that wonderful khaki-green American thermos made of corrugated plastic, with a quicksilver, mirrorlike glass tube, which belonged to my uncle and which I broke in 1951. The tube's inside was an optical infinity-generating maelstrom, and I could stare at its reflections of itself in itself forever. That's presumably how I broke it, inadvertently dropping it on the floor. There was also my father's no less American flashlight, also brought from China, for which we pretty soon ran out of batteries, but its shining refractor's visionary clarity, vastly superior to the properties of my eye, kept me in thrall for most of my school years. Eventually, when rust started to fray its rim and its button, I took it apart and, with a couple of magnifying lenses, turned its smooth cylinder into a totally blind telescope. There was also an English field compass, which my father got from some­body with one of those doomed British PQs he'd meet off Murmansk. The compass had a phosphorescent dial and you could read its degrees under a blanket. Because the lettering was Latin, the indications had the air of numerals, and my sense was that my position's reading was not so much ac­curate as absolute. That's perhaps what was making that position unpalatable in the first place. And then there were my father's Army winter boots, whose provenance (Ameri­can? Chinese? certainly not German) I can't recall now. They were huge, pale yellow buckskin boots lined with what looked to me like coils of lamb's wool. They stood more like cannonballs than shoes on his side of the king-size bed, al­though their brown laces never were tied, since my father wore them only at home, instead of slippers; outside, they'd call too much attention to themselves and therefore their owner. Like most of that era's attire, footwear was supposed to be black, dark gray (boots), or, at best, brown. Up to the 1920s, I suppose, even up to the thirties, Russia enjoyed some semblance ofparity with the West as regards existential gadgetry and know-how. But then it snapped. Even the war, finding us in a state of arrested development, failed to fish us out of this predicament. For all their comfort, the yellow winter boots were anathema on our streets. On the other hand, this made these shizi-like monsters last longer, and as I grew up, they became a point of contention between my father and me. Thirty-five years after the war they were good enough for us to argue at length about whose right it was to wear them. In the end he won, because he died with me far away from where they stood.

XV

Among flags we preferred the Union Jack; among cigarette brands, Camel; Beefeater among liquors. Clearly our choice was dictated by sense of form, not substance. We can be forgiven, though, because our familiarity with the contents was marginal, because what circumstances and luck were offering didn't constitute choice. Besides, we weren't so much a mark vis-a-vis the Union Jack and, moreover, vis-a­vis Camels. As for Beefeater gin bottles, a friend of mine observed upon receiving one from a visiting foreigner that perhaps in the same way we get kicks from their elaborate labels, they get their kicks from the total vacancy on ours.

I nodded in agreement. He then slid his hand under a pile of magazines and fished out what I seem to remember as a Life magazine cover. It depicted the upper deck of an aircraft carrier, somewhere on the ocean. Sailors in their white tops stood on the deck looking upward—presumably at a plane or chopper from which they had been photographed. They stood in formation. From the air, the formation read: E = mc²- "Nice, isn't it?" said my friend. "Uh-huh," I said. "Where was it taken?" "Somewhere in the Pacific," he said. "\Vho cares?"

xvi

Let's turn the light off, then, or let's shut our eyes tight. What do we see? A U.S. aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific. And it's me there on the deck, waving. Or by the zCV's wheel, driving. Or in the "green and yellow basket" rhyme of Ella's singing, etc., etc. For a man is what he loves. That's why he loves it: because he is a part of it. And not a man only. Things are that way, too. I remember the roar produced by the then newly opened, imported from Lord- knows-where, American-made laundromat in Leningrad when I threw my first blue jeans into a machine. There was joy of recognition in that roar; the entire queue heard it. So with eyes shut let's admit it: we recognized something in the \Vest, in the civilization, as our own; perhaps even more so there than at home. What's more, it turned out that we were prepared to pay for that sentiment, and quite dearly —with the rest of our lives. Which is a lot, of course. But anything less than that would be plain whoring. Not to men­tion that, in those days, the rest of our lives was all we had.

1986

The Condition We Call Exile, or Acorns Aweigh

As we gather here, in this attractive and well-lit room, on this cold December evening, to discuss the plight of the writer in exile, let us pause for a minute and think of some of those who, quite naturally, didn't make it to this room. Let us imagine, for instance, Turkish Gastarbeiters prowling the streets of West Germany, uncomprehending or envious of the surrounding reality. Or let us imagine Vietnamese boat people bobbing on high seas or already settled some­where in the Australian outback. Let us imagine Mexican wetbacks crawling the ravines of Southern California, past the border patrols into the territory of the United States. Or let us imagine shiploads of Pakistanis disembarking some­where in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, hungry for menial jobs the oil-rich locals won't do. Let us imagine multitudes of Ethi­opians trekking some desert on foot into Somalia (or is it the other way around?), escaping the famine. Well, we may stop here, because that minute of imagining has already passed, although a lot could be added to this list. Nobody has ever counted these people and nobody, including the UN relief organizations, ever will: coming in millions, they elude com-

Written for the Wheatland Conference, held in Vienna in November ig87.

putation and constitute what is called—for want of a better term or a higher degree of compassion—migration.

Whatever the proper name for this phenomenon is, whatever the motives, origins, and destinations ofthese peo­ple are, whatever their impact on the societies which they abandon and to which they come, one thing is absolutely clear: they make it very difficult to talk with a straight face about the plight of the writer in exile.

Yet talk we must; and not only because literature, like poverty, is known for taking care of its own kind, but mainly because of the ancient and perhaps as yet unfounded belief that, were the masters of this world better read, the mis­management and grief that make millions hit the road could he somewhat reduced. Since there is not much on which to rest our hopes for a better world, and since everything else seems to fail one way or another, we must somehow maintain that literature is the only form of moral insurance that a society has; that it is the permanent antidote to the dog-eat- dog principle; that it provides the best argument against any sort oflmlldozer-type mass solution—if only because human diversity is literature's lock and stock, as well as its raison d'etre. We must talk because we must insist that literature is the greatest—surely greater than any creed—teacher of human subtlety, and that by interfering with literature's nat­ural existence and with people's ability to learn literature's lessons, a society reduces its own potential, slows down the pace of its evolution, ultimately, perhaps, puts its own fabric in peril. If this means that we must talk to ourselves, so much the better: not for ourselves but perhaps for literature.

Whether he likes it or not, Gastarbeiters and refugees of any stripe effectively pluck the orchid out of an exiled writer's lapel. Displacement and misplacement are this cen­tury's commonplace. And what our exiled writer has in com­mon with a Gastarbeiter or a political refugee is that in either

24 I J О SEPH B R О D SKY

case a man is running away from the worse toward the better. The truth of the matter is that from a tyranny one can be exiled only to a democracy. For good old exile ain't what it used to be. It isn't leaving civilized Rome for savage Sarmatia anymore, nor is it sending a man from, say, Bulgaria to China. No, as a rule what takes place is a transition from a political and economic backwater to an industrially advanced society with the latest word on individual liberty on its lips. And it must be added that perhaps taking this route is for an exiled writer, in many ways, like going home—because he gets closer to the seat of the ideals which inspired him all along.

If one were to assign the life of an exiled writer a genre, it would have to be tragicomedy. Because of his previous incarnation, he is capable of appreciating the social and ma­terial advantages of democracy far more intensely than its natives do. Yet for precisely the same reason (whose main by-product is the linguistic barrier), he finds himself totally unable to play any meaningful role in his new society. The democracy into which he has arrived provides him with phys­ical safety but renders him socially insignificant. And the lack of significance is what no writer, exile or not, can take.

For it is the quest for significance that very often con­stitutes most of his career. To say the least, it is very often a literary career's consequence. In the case of the exiled writer, it is almost invariably the cause of his exile. And one is terribly tempted to add here that the existence of this desire in a writer is a conditioned response on his part to the vertical structure of his original society. (For a writer living in a free society, the presence of this desire bespeaks the atavistic memory every democracy has of its unconsti­tutional past.)

In this respect, the plight of an exiled writer is indeed much worse than that of a Gastarbeiter or the average ref­ugee. His appetite for recognition makes him restless and oblivious to the superiority ofhis income as a college teacher, lecturer, small-magazine editor or just a contributor—for these are the most frequent occupations of exiled authors nowadays—over the wages of somebody doing menial work. That is, our man is a little bit corrupt, almost by definition. But then the sight of a writer rejoicing in insignificance, in being left alone, in anonymity is about as rare as that of a cockatoo in Greenland, even under the best possible cir­cumstances. Among exiled writers, this attitude is almost totally absent. At least, it is absent in this room. Under­standably so, of course, but saddening nonetheless.

It is saddening because if there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. One can even take it a step further and suggest that the exile's is the ultimate lesson in that virtue. And that it is especially priceless for a writer because it gives him the longest possible perspective. "And thou art far in humanity," as Keats said. To be lost in mankind, in the crowd—crowd?—among billions; to become a needle in that proverbial haystack—but a needle someone is searching for—that's what exile is all about. Put down your vanity, it says, you are but a grain of sand in the desert. Measure yourself not against your pen pals but against hu­man infinity: it is about as bad as the inhuman one. Out of that you should speak, not out of your envy or ambition.

Needless to say, this call goes unheeded. Somehow a commentator on life prefers his position to his subject and, when in exile, considers it grim enough not to aggravate it any further. As for such appeals, he considers them inap­propriate. He may be right, although calls for humility are always timely. For the other truth of the matter is that exile is a metaphysical condition. At least, it has a very strong, very clear metaphysical dimension; to ignore or to dodge it is to cheat yourself out of the meaning of what has happened to you, to doom yourself into remaining forever at the re­ceiving end of things, to ossify into an uncomprehending victim.

It is because of the absence of good examples that one cannot describe an alternative conduct (although Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Musil come to mind). Maybe just as well, because we are here evidently to talk about the reality of exile, not about its potential. And the reality of it consists of an exiled writer constantly fighting and conspiring to re­store his significance, his leading role, his authority. His main consideration, of course, is the folks back home; but he also wants to rule the roost in the malicious village of his fellow emigres. Playing ostrich to the metaphysics of his situation, he concentrates on the immediate and tangible. This means besmirching colleagues in a similar predica­ment, bilious polemics with rival publications, innumerable interviews for the BBC, Deutsche Welle, ORTF [French Radio-Television], and the Voice of America, open letters, statements for the press, going to conferences—you name it. The energy previously spent in food lines or petty officials' musty anterooms is now released and gone rampant. Un­checked by anyone, let alone his kin (for he is himself now a Caesar's wife, as it were, and beyond suspicion—how could his literate, perhaps, but aging spouse correct or contradict her certified martyr?), his ego grows rapidly in diameter and eventually, filled with CO2, lifts him from reality—especially if he resides in Paris, where the Montgolfi.er brothers set the precedent.

Traveling by balloon is precipitous and, above all, un­predictable: too easily one becomes a plaything of the winds, in this case, political winds. Small wonder, then, that our navigator keenly listens to all the forecasts, and on occasion ventures to predict the weather himself. That is, not the weather of wherever he starts or finds himself en route, but the weather at his destination, for our balloonist is invariably homeward bound.

And perhaps the third truth of the matter is that a writer in exile is, by and large, a retrospective and retroactive being. In other words, retrospection plays an excessive (com­pared with other people's lives) role in his existence, over­shadowing his reality and dimming the future into something thicker than its usual pea soup. Like the false prophets of Dante's Inferno, his head is forever turned backward and his tears, or saliva, are running down between his shoulder blades. Whether or not he is of elegiac disposition by nature is beside the point: doomed to a limited audience abroad, he cannot help pining for the multitudes, real or imagined, left behind. Just as the former fill him with venom, the latter fuel his fantasy. Even having gained the freedom to travel, even having actually done some traveling, he will stick in his writing to the familiar material of his past, producing, as it were, sequels to his previous works. Approached on this subject, an exiled writer will most likely evoke Ovid's Rome, Dante's Florence, and—after a small pause—Joyce's Dublin.

Indeed, we've got a pedigree, and a much longer one than that. If we want, we can trace it all the way back to Adam. And yet we should be careful about the place it tends to occupy in the public's and our own minds. We all know what happens to many a noble family over generations, or in the course of a revolution. Family trees never make or obscure the forest; and the forest is now advancing. I am mixing metaphors here, but perhaps I can justify this by remarking that to expect for ourselves the kind of future that we constitute for the above-mentioned few is imprudent rather than immodest. Of course a writer always takes him­self posthumously: and an exiled writer especially so, in­spired as he is not so much by the artificial oblivion to which he is subjected by his former state but by the way the critical profession in the free marketplace enthuses about his con­temporaries. Yet one should go carefully about this type of self-estrangement, not for any other reason than a realization that, with the population explosion, literature, too, has taken on the dimensions of a demographic phenomenon. Per reader, there are simply too many writers around today. A couple of decades ago a grown man thinking about books or authors yet to be read would come up with thirty or forty names; nowadays these names would run in the thousands. Today one walks into a bookstore the way one enters a record shop. To listen to all these groups and soloists would over­shoot a lifetime. And very few among those thousands are exiles, or even particularly good. But the public will read them, and not you, for all your halo, not because it is perverse or misguided, but because statistically it is on the side of normalcy and trash. In other words, it wants to read about itself. On any street of any city in the world at any time of night or day there are more people who haven't heard of you than those who have.

The current interest in the literature of exiles has to do, of course, with the rise of tyrannies. Herein perhaps lies our chance with the future reader, though that's the kind of insurance one would like to do without. Partly because of this noble caveat, but mainly because he can't think of the future in any other than the glowing terms of his triumphant return, an exiled writer sticks to his guns. But then why shouldn't he? Why should he try to use anything else, why should he bother probing the future in any other fashion, since it is unpredictable anyhow? The good old stuff served him well at least once: it earned him exile. And exile, after all, is a kind of success. Why not try another tack? Why not push the good old stuff around a bit more? Apart from any­thing else, it now constitutes ethnographic material, and that goes big with your Western, Northern, or (if you run afoul of a right-wing tyranny) even Eastern publisher. And there is always the chance of a masterpiece in covering the same turf twice, which possibility doesn't escape the eye of your publisher either, or at least it may provide future scholars with the notion of a "myth-making" element in your work.

But however practical-sounding, these factors are sec­ondary or tertiary among those that keep an exiled writer's eyes firmly trained on his past. The main explanation lies in the aforementioned retrospective machinery that gets un­wittingly triggered within an individual by the least evidence of his surroundings' strangeness. Sometimes the shape of a maple leaf is enough, and each tree has thousands of these. On an animal level, this retrospective machinery is con­stantly in motion in an exiled writer, nearly always unbe­knownst to him. Whether pleasant or dismal, the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already experi­enced; and the species' capacity to revert, to run back- ward—especially in its thoughts or dreams, since there we are safe as well—is extremely strong in all of us, quite ir­respective of the reality we are facing. Yet this machinery has been built into us, not for cherishing or grasping the past (in the end, we don't do either), but more for delaying the arrival of the present—for, in other words, slowing down a bit the passage of time. See the fatal exclamation of Goethe's Faust.

And the whole point about our exiled writer is that he, too, like Goethe's Faust, clings to his "fair," or not so fair, "moment," not for beholding it, but for postponement of the next one. It's not that he wants to be young again; he simply doesn't want tomorrow to arrive, because he knows that it may edit what he beholds. And the more tomorrow presses him, the more obstinate he becomes. There is terrific value in this obstinacy: with luck, it may amount to intensity of

30 I J О s E PH B R О DSKY

concentration and then, indeed, we may get a great work of literature (the reading public and the publishers sense that, and this is why—as I've already said—they keep an eye on the literature of exiles).

More often, however, this obstinacy translates itselfinto the repetitiveness of nostalgia, which is, to put it bluntly, simply a failure to deal with the realities of the present or the uncertainties of the future.

One can, ofcourse, help matters somewhat by changing one's narrative manner, by making it more avant-garde, by spicing the stuff with a good measure of eroticism, violence, foul language, etc., after the fashion of our free-market col­leagues. But stylistic shifts and innovations greatly depend on the condition of the literary idiom "back there," at home, the links with which have not been severed. As for the spice, a writer, exiled or not, never wants toappear to be influenced by his contemporaries. Perhaps an additional truth about the matter is that exile slows down one's stylistic evolution, that it makes a writer more conservative. Style is not so much the man as the man's nerves, and, on the whole, exile pro­vides one's nerves with fewer irritants than the motherland does. This condition, it must be added, worries an exiled writer somewhat, not only because he regards existence back home as more genuine than his own (by definition, and with all attendant or imagined consequences for normal literary process), but because in his mind there exists a suspicion of a pendulum-like dependency, or ratio, between those irri­tants and his mother tongue.

One ends up in exile for a variety of reasons and under a number of circumstances. Some of them sound better, some worse, but the difference has already ceased to matter by the time one reads an obituary. On the bookshelf your place will be occupied, not by you, but by your book. And as long as they insist on making a distinction between art and life, it is better if they find your book good and your life foul than the other way around. Chances are, of course, that they won't care for either.

Life in exile, abroad, in a foreign element, is essentially a premonition of your own book-form fate, of being lost on the shelf among those with whom all you have in common is the first letter of your surname. Here you are, in some gigantic library's reading room, still open . . . Your reader won't give a damn about how you got here. To keep yourself from getting closed and shelved you've got to tell your reader, who thinks he knows it all, about something quali­tatively novel—about his world and himself. If this sounds a bit too suggestive, so be it, because suggestion is the name of the whole game anyhow, and because the distance exile puts betwee11 an author and his protagonists indeed some­times begs for the use of astronomical or ecclesiastical fig­ures.

This is what makes one think that "exile" is, perhaps, not the most apt term to describe the condition of a writer forced (by the state, by fear, by poverty, by boredom) to abandon his country. "Exile" covers, at best, the very mo­ment of departure, of expulsion; what follows is both too comfortable and too autonomous to be called by this name, which so strongly suggests a comprehensible grief. The very fact of our gathering here indicates that, if we indeed have a common denominator, it lacks a name. Are we suffering the same degree of despair, ladies and gentlemen? Are we equally sundered from our public? Do we all reside in Paris? No, but what binds us is our book-like fate, the same literal and symbolic lying open on the table or the floor of the gigantic library, at various ends, to be trampled on or picked up by a mildly curious reader or—worse—by a dutiful li­brarian. The qualitatively novel stuffwe may tell that reader about is the autonomous, spacecraft-like mentality that visits,

32 I J О SEPH B R OD SKY

I am sure, every one of us, but whose visitations most of our pages choose not to acknowledge.

\Ve do this for practical reasons, as it were, or genre considerations. Because this way lies either madness or the degree of coldness associated more with the pale-faced locals than with a hot-blooded exile. The other way, however, lies—and close, too—banality. All of this may sound to you like a typically Russian job ofissuing guidelines for literature, while, in fact, it's simply one man's reactions to finding many an exiled author—Russian ones in the first place—on the banal side of virtue. That's a great waste, because one more truth about the condition we call exile is that it accelerates tremendously one's otherwise professional flight—or drift— into isolation, into an absolute perspective: into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one's language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you over­night where it would normally take a lifetime to go. If this sounds to you like a commercial, so be it, because it is about time to sell this idea. Because I indeed wish it got more takers. Perhaps a metaphor will help: to be an exiled writer is like being a dog or a man hurtled into outer space in a capsule (more like a dog, of course, than a man, because they will never retrieve you). And your capsule is your lan­guage. To finish the metaphor off, it must be added that before long the capsule's passenger discovers that it gravi­tates not earthward but outward.

For one in our profession the condition we call exile is, first of all, a linguistic event: he is thrust from, he retreats into his mother tongue. From being his, so to speak, sword, it turns into his shield, into his capsule. What started as a private, intimate affair with the language in exile becomes fate—even before it becomes an obsession or a duty. A living language, by definition, has a centrifugal propensity—and propulsion; it tries to cover as much ground as possible— and as much emptiness as possible. Hence the population explosion, and hence your autonomous passage outward, into the domain of a telescope or a prayer.

In a manner of speaking, we all work for a dictionary. Because literature is a dictionary, a compendium of meanings for this or that human lot, for this or that experience. It is a dictionary of the language in which life speaks to man. Its function is to save the next man, a new arrival, from falling into an old trap, or to help him realize, should he fall into that trap anyway, that he has been hit by a tautology. This way he will be less impressed—and, in a way, more free. For to know the meaning oflife's terms, of what is happening to you, is liberating. It would seem to me that the condition we call exile is up for a fuller explication; that, famous for its pain, it should also be known for its pain-dulling infinity, for its forgetfulness, detachment, indifference, for its terri­fying human and inhuman vistas for which we've got no yardstick except ourselves.

\Ve must make it easier for the next man, if we can't make it safer. And the only way to make it easier for him, to make him less frightened of it, is to give him the whole measure of it—that is, as much as we ourselves can manage to cover. \Ve may argue about our responsibilities and loy­alties (toward our respective contemporaries, motherlands, otherlands, cultures, traditions, etc.) ad infinitum, but this responsibility or, rather, opportunity to set the next man— however theoretical he and his needs may be—a bit more free shouldn't become a subject for hesitation. If all this sounds a bit too lofty and humanistic, then I apologize. These distinctions are actually not so much humanistic as deter­ministic, although one shouldn't bother with such subtleties. All I am trying to say is that, given an opportunity, in the great causal chain of things, we may as well stop being just its rattling effects and try to play causes. The condition we call exile is exactly that kind of opportunity.

Yet if we don't use it, if we decide to remain effects and play exile in an old-fashioned way, that shouldn't be ex­plained away as nostalgia. Of course, it has to do with the necessity of telling about oppression, and of course, our con­dition should serve as a warning to any thinking man toying with the idea of an ideal society. That's our value for the free world: that's our function.

But perhaps our greater value and greater function are to be unwitting embodiments of the disheartening idea that a freed man is not a free man, that liberation is just the means of attaining freedom and is not synonymous with it. This highlights the extent of the damage that can be done to the species, and we can feel proud of playing this role. However, if we want to play a bigger role, the role of a free man, then we should be capable of accepting—or at least imitating—the manner in which a free man fails. A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.

A Place as Good as Any

I

The more one travels, the more complex one's sense of nos­talgia becomes. In a dream, depending on one's mania or supper or both, one is either pursued or pursues somebody through a crumpled maze of streets, lanes, and alleyways belonging to several places at once; one is in a city that does not exist on the map. A panicky flight originating as a rule in one's hometown is likely to land one helpless under the poorly lit archway in the town ofone's last year's, or the year before's, sojourn. It is so much so that eventually your trav­eler finds himself unwittingly sizing up every locale he en­counters for its potential value as a backdrop for his nightmare.

The best way to keep your subconscious from getting overburdened is to take pictures: your camera is, as it were, your lightning rod. Developed and printed, unfamiliar fa­cades and perspectives lose their potent three-dimensional­ity and their air of being an alternative to one's life. Yet one can't click nonstop, one can't constantly put things in focus —what with clutching the luggage, the shopping bags, the spouse's elbow. And with a particular vengeance the unfa­miliar three-dimensional invades the senses of unsuspecting innocents at railway stations, airports, bus stations, in a taxi, on a leisurely evening stroll to or from a restaurant.

Of these, railway stations are the most insidious. Edi­fices of arrival for you and those of departure for the locals, they insinuate travelers, tense with excitement and appre­hension, straight into the thick of things, into the heart of an alien existence, pretending to be precisely the opposite by flashing their gigantic cinzano, martini, coca-cola signs—the fiery writing that evokes familiar walls. Ah, those squares in front of railway stations! With their fountains and statues of the Leader, with their feverish bustle of traffic and cinema billboards, with their whores, hypodermic youths, beggars, winos, migrant workers; with taxicabs and stocky cabdrivers soliciting in loud snatches of unfathomable tongues! The deep-seated anxiety of every traveler makes him register the location of the taxi stand in this square with greater precision than the order of appearance of the great Master's works in the local museum—because the latter won't constitute a way of retreat.

The more one travels, the richer one's memory gets with exact locations of taxi stands, ticket offices, shortcuts to platforms, phone booths, and urinals. If not often revisited, these stations and their immediate vicinities merge and su­perimpose on each other in one's mind, like everything that's stored for too long, resulting in a gigantic brick-cum-cast- iron, chlorine-smelling octopal ogre, submerged in one's memory, to which every new destination adds a tentacle.

There are apparent exceptions: the great mother, Vic­toria Station in London; Nerva's masterpiece in Rome or the garish monumental monstrosity in Milan; Amsterdam's Cen­tral with one of its fronton's dials showing the direction and speed of the wind; Paris's Care du Nord or Care de Lyon with the latter's mind-boggling restaurant, where, consum­ing superb canard under frescoes a la Denis, you watch through the huge glass wall trains departing down below with a faint sense of metabolic connection; the Hauptbahnhof near Frankfurt's red-light district; Moscow's Three-Railroad- Stations Square—the ideal place to ladle despair and indi­rection even for those whose native alphabet is Cyrillic. These exceptions, however, do not so much confirm the rule as form the core or kernel for subsequent accretions. Their Piranesean vaults and staircases echo, perhaps even enlarge, the seat of the subconscious; at any rate, they remain there—in the brain—for good, waiting for addition.

II

And the more legendary your destination, the more readily this gigantic octopus comes to the surface, feeding equally well on airports, bus terminals, harbors. Its real dainty, though, is the place itself. What constitutes the legend— artifice or edifice, a tower or a cathedral, a breathtaking ancient ruin or a unique library—goes first. Our monster salivates over these nuggets, and so do travel agencies' posters, jumbling Westminster Abbey, the Eiffel Tower, St Basil, the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis, and some pagodas in an eye-catching, mind-skipping collage. We know these vertical things before we've seen them. What's more, after having seen them, we retain not their three-dimensional image but their printed version.

Strictly speaking, we remember not a place but our postcard of it. Say "London" and your mind most likely will Hash the view of the National Gallery or Tower Bridge with the Union Jack logo discreetly printed in a corner or on the opposite side. Say "Paris," and . . . There is perhaps nothing wrong with this sort of reduction or swapping, for had a human mind indeed been able to cohere and retain the

38 I J О SEPH B R О D s K y

reality of this world, the life of its owner would become a nonstop nightmare oflogic and justice. At least its laws imply as much. Unable or unwilling to be held accountable, man decides to move first and loses either count or track of what he experiences, especially for the umpteenth time. The re­sult is not so much a hodgepodge or a jumble as a composite vision: of a green tree if you are a painter, of a mistress if you are a Don Giovanni, of a victim if you are a tyrant, of a city if you are a traveler.

Whatever one travels for—to modify one's territorial imperative, to get an eyeful of creation, to escape reality (awful tautology though this is), the net result of course is feeding that octopus constantly hungry for new details for its nightly chow. The composite city of your subconscious sojourn—nay! return—will therefore permanently sport a golden cupola; several bell towers; an opera house a la Feni- ce in Venice; a park with gloom-laden chestnuts and poplars, incomprehensible in their post-Romantic swaying grandeur, as in Graz; a wide, melancholy river spanned by a minimum of six well-wrought bridges; a skyscraper or two. Mter all, a city as such has only so many options. And, as though semi­conscious of that, your memory will throw in a granite em­bankment with its vast colonnades from Russia's former capital; Parisian pearl-gray fac;ades with the black lace of their balconies' grillwork; a few boulevards petering out into the lilac sunset of one's adolescence; a gothic needle or that of an obelisk shooting its heroin into a cloudy muscle; and, in winter, a well-tanned Roman terra-cotta; a marble fountain; poorly lit, cave-like cafe life at street comers.

Your memory will accord this place a history whose particulars you probably won't recall but whose main fruit will most likely be a democracy. The same source will endow it with a temperate climate adhering to the four-seasons routine and segregating palm trees to railway stations' grill­rooms. It will also give your city Reykjavi'k-on-Sunday-type traffic; people will be few if any; beggars and children, how­ever, will speak the foreign tongue fluently. The currency will carry images ofRenaissance scholars, the coins feminine profiles of the republic, but the numbers will still be rec­ognizable, and your main problem—not of paying, but of tipping—can, in the end, be solved. In other words, re­gardless of what it says on your ticket, of whether you'll be staying at the Savoy or the Danieli, the moment you open your shutters, you'll see at once Notre-Dame, St. James's, San Giorgio, and Hagia Sophia.

For the aforesaid submerged monster digests legends as eagerly as reality. Add to that the latter's aspiration for the glory of the former (or the former's claim to enjoying, at least onee upon a time, the status of the latter). Small wonder, then, that your city should, as though it's been painted by Claude or Corot, have some water: a harbor, a lake, a lagoon. Smaller wonder still that the medieval ram­parts or molars of its Roman wall should look like an intended background for some steel-cum-glass-cum-concrete struc­tures: a university, say, or more likely an insurance company headquarters. These are usually erected on the site of some monastery or ghetto bombed out of existence in the course of the last war. Small wonder, too, that a traveler reveres ancient ruins many times over the modern ones left in the center of your city by its fathers for didactic purposes: a traveler, by definition, is a product of hierarchic thinking.

In the final analysis, however, there is no hierarchy between the legendary and the real, in the context of your city at least, since the present engenders the past far more energetically than the other way around. Every car passing through an intersection makes its equestrian monument more obsolete, more ancient, telescoping its great local eighteenth-century military or civic genius into some skin- clad William Tell or other. With all four hooves firmly on the plinth (which, in the parlance of sculpture, means that the rider has died not on the battlefield but in his own, presumably four-poster bed), this monument's horse would stand in your city more as an homage to an extinct means of transportation than to anyone's particular valor. The birds' ca-ca on the bronze tricorn is all the more deserved, for history long since exited your city, yielding the stage to the more elementary forces of geography and commerce. There­fore, your city will have not only a cross between a bazaar in Istanbul and Macy's; no, a traveler in this city, should he turn right, is bound to hit the silks, furs, and leather of via Condotti and, if he turns left, to find himself buying either fresh or canned pheasant at Fauchon (and the canned one is preferable).

For buy you must. As the philosopher would have put it, I purchase, therefore I am. And who knows that better than a man in passage? In fact, every well-mapped trip is in the end a shopping expedition: indeed, one's whole passage through the world is. In fact, next to taking pictures, shop­ping comes in second at sparing one's subconscious an alien reality. In fact, that's what we call a bargain, and with a credit card you can go on infinitely. In fact, why don't you simply call your whole city—it surely ought to have a name—American Express? This will make it as legal as being included in the atlas: no one will dare to challenge your description. On the contrary, many would claim they've been there, too, a year or so ago. To prove this, they'll produce a bunch of snapshots or, if you are staying for a meal, even a slide show. Some of them have known Karl Malden, that city's dapper old mayor, personally for years and years.

III

It is an early evening in the town of your memory; you are sitting in a sidewalk cafe under drooping chestnuts. A traffic light idly flashes its red-amber-green eye above the empty intersection; higher up, swallows crisscross a platinum, cloudless sky. The way your coffee or your white wine tastes tells you that you are neither in Italy nor in Germany; the bill tells you that you are not in Switzerland, either. All the same, you are in Common Market territory.

On the left, there is the Concert Hall, and on the right there is the Parliament. Or it is the other way around: with architecture like this, it's hard to tell the difference. Chopin came through this town, so did Liszt, and so did Paganini. As for Wagner, the book says he went through this place three times. So did, it seems, the Pied Piper. Or maybe it's just Sunday, vacation time, midsummer. "In summer," the poet said, "capitals grow empty." An ideal season for a coup d'etat, then, for introducing tanks into these narrow cobble­stone streets—almost no traffic whatsoever. Of course, if this place is indeed a capital . . .

You have a couple of phone numbers here, but you've tried them already twice. As for the goal of your pilgrimage, the National Museum, justly famous for its Italian Masters, you went there straight from the train, and it closes at five. And anyhow, what's wrong with great art—with Italian Mas­ters in particular—is that it makes you resent reality. If, of course, this is a reality . . .

So you open the local Time Out and consider theater. It's Ibsen and Chekhov all over the place, the usual Conti­nental fare. Luckily, you don't know the language. The Na­tional Ballet appears to be touring Japan, and you won't sit through Madama Butterfly for the sixth time even if the set was designed by Hockney. That leaves movies and pop groups, yet the small print of these pages, not to mention the bands' names, makes you briefly nauseous. On the ho­rizon looms further expansion of your waistline in some Lu- tece or Golden Horseshoe. It is actually your widening diameter that narrows your options.

The more one travels, though, the better one knows that curling up in a hotel room with Flaubert won't do either. The sounder solution is a stroll in an amusement park, half an hour in a shooting gallery, or a video game—something that boosts the ego and doesn't require knowledge of the local tongue. Or else take a taxi to the top of the hill that dominates the view and offers a terrific panorama of your composite city and its environs: the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, Westminster Abbey, St. Basil—the whole thing. This is yet another nonverbal experience; a "wow" will suf­fice. That's, of course, if there is a hill, or if there is a taxi . . .

Return to your hotel on foot: it's downhill all the way. Admire shrubs and hedges shielding the stylish mansions; admire the rustling acacias and somber monoliths of the business center. Linger by well-lit shop windows, especially those selling watches. Such a variety, almost like in Switz­erland! It's not that you need a new watch; it's just a nice way of killing time—looking at the watches. Admire toys and admire lingerie: these appeal to the family man in you. Admire the clean-swept pavement and perfect infinity of avenues: you always had a soft spot for geometry, which, as you know, means "no people."

So if you find somebody in the hotel bar, it's most likely a man like yourself, a fellow traveler. "Hey," he'll say, turn­ing his face toward you. "Why is this place so empty? Neu­tron bomb or something?"

"Sunday," you'll reply. "It's just Sunday, midsummer, vacation time. Everyone's gone to the beaches." Yet you know you'll be lying. Because it is neither Sunday nor the Pied Piper, nor the neutron bomb nor beaches that make your composite city empty. It is empty because for an imag­ination it is easier to conjure architecture than human beings.

1986

Uncommon Visage

The Nobel Lecture

I

For someone rather private, for someone who all his life has preferred his private condition to any role of social signifi­cance, and who went in this preference rather far—far from his homeland, to say the least, for it is better to be a total failure in a democracy than a martyr, or la creme de la creme, in a tyranny—for such a person to find himselfall ofa sudden on this rostrum is a somewhat uncomfortable and trying experience.

This sensation is aggravated not so much by the thought of those who stood here before me as by the memory of those who have been bypassed by this honor, who were not given this chance to address urbi et orbi, as they say, from this rostrum, and whose cumulative silence is sort of searching, to no avail, for release through this speaker here.

The only thing that can reconcile one to this sort of situation is the simple realization that—for stylistic reasons, in the first place—one writer cannot speak for another writer, one poet for another poet especially; that had Osip Mandelstam or Marina Tsvetaeva or Robert Frost or Anna Akhmatova or Wystan Auden stood here, they couldn't have helped but speak precisely for themselves; and they, too, might have felt somewhat uncomfortable.

These shades disturb me constantly; they are disturb­ing me today as well. In any case, they do not spur one to eloquence. In my better moments, I deem myself their sum total, though invariably inferior to any one of them individ­ually. For it is not possible to better them on the page; nor is it possible to better them in actual life. And it is precisely their lives, no matter how tragic or bitter they were, that often move me—more often, perhaps, than the case should be—to regret the passage of time. If the next life exists— and I can no more deny them the possibility of eternal life than I can forget their existence in this one—if the next world does exist, they will, I hope, forgive me, and the quality of what I am about to utter: after all, it is not one's conduct on a podium that dignity in our profession is mea­sured by.

I have mentioned only five of them, those whose deeds and whose lot matter so much to me, if only because if it were not for them, I, as both a man and a writer, would amount to much less; in any case, I wouldn't be standing here today. There were more of them, those shades—better still, sources of light: lamps? stars?—more, of course, than just five. And each one of them is capable of rendering me absolutely mute. The number of those is substantial in the life of any conscious man of letters; in my case, it doubles, thanks to the two cultures to which fate has willed me to belong. Matters are not made easier by thoughts about con­temporaries and fellow writers in both these cultures, poets and fiction writers whose gifts I rank above my own, and who, had they found themselves on this rostrum, would have come to the point long ago, for surely they have more to tell the world than I do.

I will allow myself, therefore, to make a number of

46 I J 0 S E P H B R 0 D S K Y

remarks here—disjointed, perhaps stumbling, perhaps even perplexing in their randomness. However, the amount of time allotted to me to collect my thoughts, as well as my very occupation, will, or may, I hope, shield me, at least partially, against charges of being chaotic. A man of my oc­cupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking; at worst, he claims to have a system—but even that, in his case, is a borrowing from a milieu, from a social order, or from the pursuit of philosophy at a tender age. Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal—however permanent it may be—than the creative process itself, the process of compo­sition. Verse really does, in Akhmatova's words, grow from rubbish; the roots of prose are no more honorable.

ii

If art teaches anything—to the artist, in the first place—it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness—thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous "I." Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem by, say, Rainer Maria Rilke. A work ofart, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct —free of any go-betweens—relations.

It is for this reason that art in general, literature es­pecially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by champions of the common good, masters of the masses, her­alds ofhistorical necessity. For there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover, in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and po- lvphonv; in place of the resolve to act, inattention and fastid­iousness. In other words, into the little zeros with which the champions of the common good and the rulers of the masses tend to operate, art introduces a "period, period, comma, and a minus," transforming each zero into a tiny human, albeit not always a pretty, face.

The great Baratynsky, speaking of his Muse, character­ized her as possessing an "uncommon visage." It's in ac­quiring this "uncommon visage" that the meaning of human existence seems to lie, since for this uncommonness we are, as it were, prepared genetically. Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mas­tering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends. It would be regrettable to squander a single chance by assuming someone else's appearance, someone else's experience, whether by reducing or by expanding this single chance in a tautology—regrettable all the more be­cause the heralds of historical necessity, at whose urging a man may be prepared to agree to this tautology, will not go to the grave with him, or give him so much as a thank-you.

Language and, presumably, literature are things that are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent—better yet, the infinite— against the temporary, against the finite. To say the least, as long as the state permits itself to interfere with the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social or­ganization, like any system in general, is by definition a form of the past tense that aspires to impose itselfupon the present (and often on the future as well); and a man who works in grammar is the last one who can afford to forget this. The real danger for a writer is not so much the possibility (and often the certainty) of persecution on the part of the state as it is the possibility of finding oneself mesmerized by the state's features, which, whether monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, are always temporary.

The philosophy of the state, its ethics—not to mention its aesthetics—are always "yesterday." Language and literature are always "today," and often—particularly in the case where a political system is orthodox—they may even constitute "tomorrow." One of literature's merits is precisely that it helps a person to make the time of his existence more spe- cifi.c, to distinguish himself from the crowd of his predeces­sors as well as his like numbers, to avoid tautology—that is, the fate otherwise known by the honorific term "victim of history." What makes art in general, and literature in par­ticular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art this sort of conduct is called "cliche."

Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is de­termined not by the individuality of the artist but by the dynamics and the logic of the material itself, by the previous fate of the means that each time demand (or suggest) a qual­itatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own geneal­ogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not synonymous with, but at best parallel to, history; and the manner by which it exists is by continually generating a new aesthetic reality. That is why it is often found "ahead of progress," ahead of history, whose main instrument is—should we not, once more, improve upon Marx—precisely the cliche.

Nowadays, for example, there exists a ratherwidely held view, postulating that in his work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language of the street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite absurd, and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case literature, to history. It is only ifwe have resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens to come to a halt in his devel­opment that literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise it is the people who should speak the language of literature.

On the whole, every new aesthetic reality makes man's eth­ical reality more precise. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics. The categories of "good" and "bad" are, first and foremost, aesthetic ones, at least etymologically preceding the categories of "good" and "evil." If in ethics not "all is permitted," it is precisely because not "all is permitted" in aesthetics, because the number of colors in the spectrum is limited. The tender babe who cries and rejects the stranger who, on the contrary, reaches out to him, does so instinc­tively, makes an aesthetic choice, not a moral one.

Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic experience is always a private one. Every new aes­thetic reality makes one's experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then a form of defense, against enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly with literary taste, is less sus­ceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations pe­culiar to any version of political demagogy. The point is not so much that virtue does not constitute a guarantee for pro­ducing a masterpiece as that evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist. The more substantial an individual's aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper

5o I J О s E PH B R О D s K Y

his moral focus, the freer—though not necessarily the hap­pier—he is.

It is precisely in this applied, rather than Platonic, sense that we should understand Dostoevsky's remark that beauty will save the world, or Matthew Arnold's belief that we shall be saved by poetry. It is probably too late for the world, but for the individual man there always remains a chance. An aesthetic instinct develops in man rather rapidly, for even without fully realizing who he is and what he actually re­quires, a person instinctively knows what he doesn't like and what doesn't suit him. In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species' development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature—and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution—is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.

I am far from suggesting the idea of compulsory training in verse composition; nevertheless the subdivision of society into intelligentsia and "all the rest" seems to me unaccept­able. In moral terms, this situation is comparable to the subdivision of society into the poor and the rich; but if it is still possible to find some purely physical or material grounds for the existence of social inequality, for intellectual in­equality these are inconceivable. Equality in this respect, unlike in anything else, has been guaranteed to us by nature. I speak not of education but of the education in speech, the slightest imprecision in which may trigger the intrusion of false choice into one's life. The existence of literature pre­figures existence on literature's plane of regard—and not only in the moral sense, but lexically as well. If a piece of music still allows a person the possibility ofchoosing between the passive role of listener and the active one of performer, a work of literature—of the art which is, to use Montale's phrase, incurably semantic—dooms him to the role of per­former only.

In this role, it would seem to me, a person should appear more often than in any other. Moreover, it seems to me that, as a result of the population explosion and the attendant, ever-increasing atomization of society (i.e., the ever-increas­ing isolation of the individual), this role becomes more and more inevitable for a person. I don't suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved. A novel or a poem is not a monologue but a conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation-, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others—if you will, mutually misanthropic. And in the mo­ment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person's conduct. It's precisely this that I have in mind in speaking of the role of the performer, all the more natural for one because a novel or a poem is the product of mutual loneliness—of a writer, or a reader.

In the history of our species, in the history of Homo sapiens, the book is an anthropological development, similar essen­tially to the invention of the wheel. Having emerged in order to give us some idea not so much of our origins as of what that sapiens is capable of, a book constitutes a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page. This movement, like every movement,

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becomes a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to elevate this denominator's line, previously never reaching higher than the groin, to our heart, to our con­sciousness, to our imagination. This flight is the flight in the direction of "uncommon visage," in the direction of the nu­merator, in the direction of autonomy, in the direction of privacy. Regardless of whose image we are created in, there are already five billion of us, and for a human being there is no other future save that outlined by art. Otherwise, what lies ahead is the past—the political one, first of all, with all its mass police entertainment.

In any event, the condition of society in which art in general, and literature in particular, are the property or prerogative of a minority appears to me unhealthy and dan­gerous. I am not appealing for the replacement of the state with a library, although this thought has visited me fre­quently; but there is no doubt in my mind that, had we been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experi­ence and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. It seems to me that a potential master of our fates should be asked, first of all, not about how he imagines the course of his foreign policy, but about his at­titude toward Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If only be­cause the lock and stock of literature is indeed human diversity and perversity, it turns out to be a reliable antidote for any attempt—whether familiar or yet to be invented— toward summary solutions to the problems of human exis­tence. As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philo­sophical doctrine.

Since there are no laws that can protect us from our­selves, no criminal code is capable ofpreventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature—the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books—we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: the neglect of books, the nonreading of them. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history. Living in the country I live in, I would be the first one prepared to believe that there is a set dependency between a person's material well-being and his literary ignorance. What keeps me from doing so is the history of the country in which I was born and grew up. For, reduced to a cause- and-effect minimum, to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority: the celebrated Russian intelligentsia.

I have'no wish to enlarge upon the subject, no wish to darken this evening with thoughts of the tens of millions of human lives destroyed by other millions, since what oc­curred in Russia in the first half of the twentieth century occurred before the introduction of automatic weapons—in the name of the triumph of a political doctrine whose un- soundness is already manifested in the fact that it requires human sacrifice for its realization. I'll just say that I believe—not empirically, alas, but only theoretically—that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is somewhat more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens. And I am speak­ing precisely about reading Dickens, Sterne, Stendhal, Dos- toevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, Proust, Musil, and so forth; that is, about literature, not about literacy or educa­tion. A literate, educated person, to be sure, is fully capable, after reading some political treatise or tract, of killing his like, and even of experiencing, in so doing, a rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was

Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.

However, before I move on to poetry, I would like to add that it would make sense to regard the Russian expe­rience as a warning, iffor no other reason than that the social structure of the West up to now is, on the whole, analogous to what existed in Russia prior to 1917. (This, by the way, is what explains the popularity in the West ofthe nineteenth- century Russian psychological novel and the relative lack of success of contemporary Russian prose. The social relations that emerged in Russia in the twentieth century presumably seem no less exotic to the reader than do the names of the characters, which prevent him from identifying with them.) For example, the number of political parties, on the eve of the October coup in 1917, was no fewer than what we find today in the United States or Britain. In other words, a dispassionate observer might remark that in a certain sense the nineteenth century is still going on in the West, while in Russia it came to an end; and if I say it ended in tragedy, this is, in the first place, because of the size of the human toll taken in the course of that social—or chronological— change. For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.

III

Although for a man whose mother tongue is Russian to speak about political evil is as natural as digestion, I would like here to change the subject. What's wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the speed with which they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation ofbeing right. Herein lies their temptation, similar in its nature to the temptation of a social reformer who begets this evil. The realization, or rather the comprehension, of this temptation, and the re­jection of it, are perhaps responsible to a certain extent for the destinies of many of my contemporaries, responsible for the literature that emerged from under their pens. It, that literature, was neither a flight from history nor a muffling of memory, as it may seem from the outside. "How can one write poetry after Auschwitz?" inquired Adorno; and one familiar with Russian history can repeat the same question by merely changing the name of the camp—and repeat it perhaps with even greater justification, since the number of people who perished in Stalin's camps far surpasses the num­ber of German prison-camp victims. "And how can one eat lunch?" the American poet Mark Strand once retorted. In any case, the generation to which I belong has proven ca­pable of writing that poetry.

That generation—the generation born precisely at the time when the Auschwitz crematoria were working full blast, when Stalin was at the zenith ofhis godlike, absolute power, which seemed sponsored by Mother Nature herself—that generation came into the world, it appears, in order to con­tinue what, theoretically, was supposed to be interrupted in those crematoria and in the anonymous common graves of Stalin's archipelago. The fact that not everything got inter­rupted, at least not in Russia, can be credited in no small degree to my generation, and I am no less proud ofbelonging to it than I am of standing here today. And the fact that I am standing here today is a recognition of the services that generation has rendered to culture; recalling a phrase from Mandelstam, I would add, to world culture. Looking back, I can say now that we were beginning in an empty—indeed, a terrifyingly wasted—place, and that, intuitively rather than consciously, we aspired precisely to the re-creation of the

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effect of culture's continuity, to the reconstruction of its forms and tropes, toward filling its few surviving, and often totally compromised, forms with our own new, or appearing to us as new, contemporary content.

There existed, presumably, another path: the path of further deformation, the poetics of ruins and debris, of min­imalism, of choked breath. If we rejected it, it was not at all because we thought that it was the path of self-dramatization, or because we were extremely animated by the idea of pre­serving the hereditary nobility of the forms of culture we knew, the forms that were equivalent, in our consciousness, to forms of human dignity. We rejected it because in reality the choice wasn't ours but, in fact, culture's own—and this choice, again, was aesthetic rather than moral.

To be sure, it is natural for a person to perceive himself not as an instrument ofculture but, on the contrary, as its creator and custodian. But if today I assert the opposite, it's not because toward the close of the twentieth century there is a certain charm in paraphrasing Plotinus, Lord Shaftesbury, Schelling, or Novalis, but because, unlike anyone else, a poet always knows that what in the vernacular is called the voice of the Muse is, in reality, the dictate of the language; that it's not the language that happens to be his instrument, but that he is language's means toward the continuation of its existence. Language, however, even if one imagines it as a certain animate creature (which would only be just), is not capable of ethical choice.

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart ofhis beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave—as he thinks at that moment—a trace on the earth. He resorts to this form—the poem—most likely for unconsciously mimetic reasons: the black vertical clot of words on the white sheet of paper presumably reminds him of his own situation in the world, of the balance between space and his body. But re­gardless of the reasons for which he takes up the pen, and regardless of the effect produced by what emerges from under that pen on his audience—however great or small it may be—the immediate consequence of this enterprise is the sensation of coming into direct contact with language, or more precisely, the sensation of immediately falling into dependence on it, on everything that has already been ut­tered, written, and accomplished in it.

This dependence is absolute, despotic; but it unshackles as well. For, while always older than the writer, language still possesses the colossal centrifugal energy imparted to it by its temporal potential—that is, by all the time lying ahead. And this potential is determined not so much by the quan­titative body of the nation that speaks it (though it is deter­mined by that, too) as by the quality of the poem written in it. It will suffice to recall the authors of Greek or Roman antiquity; it will suffice to recall Dante. And that which is being created today in Russian or English, for example, guar­antees the existence of these languages over the course of the next millennium also. The poet, I wish to repeat, is language's means for existence—or, as my beloved Auden said, he is the one by whom it lives. I who write these lines will cease to be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are written and in which you read them will remain, not merely because language is a more lasting thing than man, but because it is more capable of mutation.

One who writes a poem, however, writes it not because he courts fame with posterity, although often he hopes that a poem will outlive him, at least briefly. One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule

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doesn't know the way it is going to come out; and at times he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected, often his thought carries him further than he reckoned. And that is the moment when the future of language invades its present.

There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: an­alytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the bibli­cal prophets: revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished to go. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accel­erator of consciousness, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I suppose, what they call a poet.

1987

(Translated by Barry Rubin)

Acceptance Speech

Members of the Swedish Academy, Your Majesties, ladies and gentlemen, I was born and grew up on the other shore of the Baltic, practically on its opposite gray, rustling page. Sometimes on clear days, especially in autumn, standing on a beach somewhere in Kellomaki, a friend would point his finger northwest across the sheet of water and say: See that blue strip of land? It's Sweden.

He would be joking, of course: because the angle was wrong, because according to the law of optics, a human eye can travel only for something like twenty miles in open space. The space, however, wasn't open.

Nonetheless, it pleases me to think, ladies and gentle­men, that we used to inhale the same air, eat the same fish, get soaked by the same—at times—radioactive rain, swim in the same sea, get bored by the same kind of conifers. Depending on the wind, the clouds I saw in my window were already seen by you, or vice versa. It pleases me to think that we have had something in common before we ended up in this room.

And as far as this room is concerned, I think it was empty just a couple of hours ago, and it will be empty again a couple of hours hence. Our presence in it, mine especially, is quite incidental from its walls' point of view. On the whole, from space's point of view, anyone's presence is incidental in it, unless one possesses a permanent—and usually inan­imate—characteristic oflandscape: a moraine, say, a hilltop, a river bend. And it is the appearance of something or some­body unpredictable within a space well used to its contents that creates the sense of occasion.

So being grateful to you for your decision to award me the Nobel Prize for literature, I am essentially grateful for your imparting to my work an aspect of permanence, like that of a glacier's debris, let's say, in the vast landscape ofliterature.

I am fully aware of the danger hidden in this simile: of coldness, uselessness, eventual or fast erosion. Yet if that debris contains a single vein of animated ore—as I, in my vanity, believe it does—then this simile is perhaps prudent.

And as long as I am on the subject of prudence, I should like to add that through recorded history the audience for poetry seldom amounted to more than 1 percent of the entire population. That's why poets of antiquity or of the Renais­sance gravitated to courts, the seats of power; that's why nowadays they flock to universities, the seats of knowledge. Your academy seems to be a cross between the two; and if in the future—in that time free of ourselves—that 1 percent ratio is sustained, it will be, not to a small degree, due to your efforts. In case this strikes you as a dim vision of the future, I hope that the thought of the population explosion may lift your spirits somewhat. Even a quarter of that 1 percent would make a lot of readers, even today.

So my gratitude to you, ladies and gentlemen, is not entirely egotistical. I am grateful to you for those whom your decisions make and will make read poetry, today and to­morrow. I am not so sure that man will prevail, as the great man and my fellow American once said, standing, I believe, in this very room; but I am quite positive tha^t a man who reads poetry is harder to prevail upon than one who doesn't.

Of course, it's one hell of a way to get from St. Peters­burg to Stockholm; but then, for a man of my occupation, the notion of a straight line being the shortest distance be­tween two points lost its attraction a long time ago. So it pleases me to find out that geography in its own tum is also capable of poetic justice.

Thank you.

1987

After a Journey, or Homage to Vertebrae

No matter how horrid, or else vapid, a day has turned out to be, in the end you stretch out on your bed—and you are no longer an ape, a man, a bird, or even a fish. Horizontality in nature is rather of a geological denomination and has to do with deposits: it is an homage to vertebrae and designed for the future. The same, on the whole, goes for all sorts of travel notes and memoirs: the mind there seems to get flat on its back and give up resistance, preparing for a rest rather than for settling scores with reality.

Sketching from memory: 1978, a journey to Brazil. Hardly a journey to speak of: a junket, really, in the name of international cultural exchange; just took a plane at 9 p.m. (total mess at the airport: Varig overbooked the flight two to one; the result the usual railway-station panic; the staff lack­adaisical and indifferent—you sense you are dealing with a state—the company is nationalized, and everyone is a state employee). The plane was crammed, babies screaming, the back of my seat would not budge; all night I stayed vertical, with sleeping pills piling up in the abdomen. Bearing in mind that I had flown in from England just forty-eight hours before. Stifling, musty, etc. On top of everything else, in­stead of nine hours, the flight took twelve, since we touched down first in Sao Paulo—pleading fog in Rio, but in fact half the passengers had tickets precisely for Sao Paulo.

From the airport to downtown the taxi is rushing along the right (?) bank of that famous January River, overgrown with cranes and ocean ships—freighters, tankers, etc. Here and there looms a gray bulk of the Brazilian Navy. (One morning I walk out of the hotel and see Alexander Vertinsky's couplet sailing into the harbor: "When we see the tall Bra­zilian cruiser, sailors'll tell us tales about a geyser.") So, on the left, there are ships and the harbor; on the right, every hundred or so meters, cocoa-shaded kids playing soccer.

Speaking of the latter, I must note that Brazil's triumphs in this particular sport are no longer surprising when you've seen the way people drive here. What is really puzzling, with this kind of dribbling traffic, is the growth of the coun­try's population. A local driver is a cross between Pele and a kamikaze. Apart from that, the very first thing you spot is the prevalence of VW Bugs. It is virtually the only make available here. Now and then, of course, you may notice a Renault, a Peugeot, or a Ford, but they are clearly in the minority. The same goes for telephones—all of them are Siemens (and Schuckert). In a word, the Germans are in the saddle here, one way or another. (Was it Franz Beckenbauer who said, "Soccer is the most essential of all inessential things"?)

They lodge us at the Gloria Hotel, an old-fashioned, fourteen- floor affair with an extremely weird system of elevators re­quiring constant hopping from one to another. In the week I stayed at this place I got used to it as to some kind of womb—or the entrails of an octopus. In a certain sense, the hotel was much more absorbing than the world outside. Rio—at least the part I managed to see—is a very monot­onous city, with all its riches and its poverty, both by accident

64 I J 0 s E PH B R О D s K Y

and by design. The two- or three-kilometer strip between the ocean and the looming cliffs is entirely overgrown with utterly moronic—a la that idiot Le Corbusier—beehive "structures." As though the vista denies man imagination. Perhaps it does. The eighteenth and the nineteenth centu­ries are completely wiped out. Occasionally you can bump into the debris of the mercantile style of the turn of the century, with its surreal medley of arcades, balconies, wind­ing stairs, turrets, gates, and whatnot. But this is rare, and of no relief. And equally rare and relief-free are the small three- or four-floor hotels in the back streets behind the concrete-cum-stucco giants, or in the narrow lanes climbing up the hills at a minimum seventy-five-degree angle, wind­ing up into an evergreen forest, the real jungle. There, in these narrow streets, in little villas and cobbled-up tene­ments, dwells the local population, employed mainly by the tourist outfits: extremely poor, somewhat desperate, but on the whole not overly protesting. At night, at every ten meters or so, you are offered a fuck, and later the West German consul treated us to the observation that prostitutes in Rio do not take money—or at least do not expect to get any, and are surprised if a client offers to pay.

It felt as if his excellency was right. Still, no opportunity to prove this personally ever arose, since I was kept occu­pied, as they say, from morn till night by a leggy Nordic delegate—or was she just an observer?—whose hairdo as well as a rather humdrum style of surrender brought mem­ories of the same latitude and of N. N., with the difference that the latter was neither rude nor vain (and that I was younger and better then, and had N. not introduced me to her breadwinner and their bilious ofl'spring, I could, who knows, have overcome this shortcoming and arrived at a less bitter end). On the third day of my stay in Rio—and the second day of the Nordic Games—we went to the beach at Copacabana, where, while I was getting sun, I was eased out offour hundred bucks as well as my favorite watch, which had been given to me by Liz Frank in Massachusetts six years before. The theft was staged splendidly, and as with everything here, nature was involved as well—this time in the guise of a light brown German shepherd loitering on the beach who, now and then, at his master's instigation, pulled at a traveler's pants. The traveler would not, of course, sus­pect a quadruped: a nice doggy jumping around, so what! The biped, in the meantime, voids your pockets, leaving you—very considerately—with a couple of cruzeiros for the bus trip back to the hotel. So potentially costly experiments were out of the question, whatever the German consul claimed while treating us to an impressive homebrew that glittered with all the colors of the rainbow. To be fair to him, though, he did usefully warn us against splashing in the ocean, citing both the extraordinary undertow and two mem­bers of the Hungarian mission only last week gobbled up by sharks in plain view of the city.

The beaches in Rio are indeed tremendous. When the plane starts to descend onto this continent, you have the impression that almost all the Brazilian coast is one unin­terrupted beach, from the equator to Patagonia. From the top of Corcovado—the rock dominating the town and crowned with a twenty-meter-high statue of Christ (given to the city by none other than Mussolini)—one can see all three of them: Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon, and many oth­ers to the north and south of Rio, as well as the endless mountain chains at whose foothills are scattered the white concrete stalagmites of the city. On a clear day you feel that all your eye ever beheld before is but the measly, lackluster pickings ofan arrested imagination. The local vistas can teach human as well as divine fantasy a lesson or two; it's places like this that give geography its good name.

As I stayed here for a week only, what I am saying amounts, by definition, to no more than first impressions. This said, I can only add that Rio is a most abstract place. This is a city which, no matter how many years you spend there, won't generate many memories. For a native of Europe, Rio is biological neutrality incarnate. Not a single fa<;ade, not one little lane or gateway, evokes any associations. It is a city of this century: nothing colonial, or even Victorian, with the exception perhaps of the edifice hulking over the passenger pier, resembling simultaneously St. Isaac's Cathedral and Washington's Capitol. Thanks to this indistinct (octagons, cubes, boxes), impersonal character, thanks to the beaches, which in their scale and generosity almost offset the ocean itself, thanks to the intensity, density, diversity, and total unfamiliarity of the local vegetation, which neither corre­sponds to nor echoes any species a European is used to, Rio gives one a sense of a total flight from the known reality. Into pure geometry, or into pure elements. All that week I felt like a former Nazi or Arthur Rimbaud: everything is behind, and just a blinking green light ahead.

"It could even be," I would say to myself, "that all of European culture, with its cathedrals, its Gothic, its Ba­roque, its rococo, its volutes, scrolls, pilasters, acanthi, etc., is nothing but the ape's longing for its forever-lost forest." Isn't it indeed telling that culture as we know it flourished precisely around the Mediterranean, where vegetation be­gins to change and, as it were, stops abruptly at the sea as if poised to leap over to its true homeland? That, in other words, architecture begins precisely where nature gives up, and that this may be true of all art? That literature is a continuation of the jungle by other means?

As far as our glorious congress was concerned, it was an event excruciating in its boredom, vacuity, and total dearth of any connection with either jungle or literature. For this reason alone, as well as for the utter sordidness of what followed, I'd better change the names of those I came to know there. I wish I could change mine, too, and for the same reasons. Julio Llianos, Tor Ostberg, and, possibly, I myself—plus of course the Great Translator—were the only writers in attendance. Initially I resolved just to ignore this delirium, but when every morning you bump into delegates (male and female deli-gators) at breakfast, in the hall, in the corridors, the whole thing little by little starts to acquire aspects of reality. Toward the end I was fighting like a lion for the creation of a PEN Club section for Vietnamese writers-in-exile. I got all worked up and tears were inter­fering with my speech.

Eventually a polygon began to take shape: Ulrich von Tim with his wife and Samantha (a subtriangle), Fernando B. (Portuguese) with his wife, Thomas (a Swede) with a lady from Denmark, and me with my Nordic charge. Anonymity is adultery's oxygen, and nothing fills up one's lungs with it like being abroad. In this (plus or minus two furtive, stocky West Germans, half drunk and half insane) company we wandered from one watering hole to another, munched and sipped. Every day, bumping into one another at breakfast in the hotel's cafeteria or in the hall, we would pose one and the same question: "What's on for tonight?" The answer usually contained the name of a restaurant espied by one of us during the daytime or an establishment where the city fathers intended to entertain us, with the pomp, orations, libations, etc., the fathers are so good at. The opening of the congress was attended by the President of the country, Gen­eral Figueiredo, who uttered three phrases, sat in the pre­sidium for a while, patted Julio Llianos on the equally Latin

American shoulder, and left accompanied by a huge caval­cade of bodyguards, cops, generals, admirals, and photog­raphers from all the local papers, who were snapping his picture with the fervor of people convinced that a lens was capable not only of capturing the great man's epidermis but of penetrating his lobes as well. It was amusing to watch all these flunkies, athletic, youngish, ready any minute to change their master or banner, clad in their blazers, ties, and starched shirts offsetting their highly tensed, sun-baked snouts. The state-bred genus, a cross between a parrot and a monkey. Plus the pining for France and the nonstop quot­ing, now Victor Hugo, now Andre Malraux, with rather prac­ticed accents. The Third World has inherited everything, including the inferiority complex, of the First and Second.

"When are you flying back?" Ulrich asked me. "To­morrow," I replied. "Lucky you," he said, for he was staying on in Rio, where he had come with his wife, presumably to salvage their marriage, at which he had already—apparently in no time—succeeded. So for a while he would be stuck in Rio, going to the beach with the local teachers of German lit. and, at night, in the hotel, slipping out of his bed, in his PJ top or bottom, sliding downstairs, and scratching at Sa- mantha's door. Her room was right under his: 1161 and 1061. You can change dollars into cruzeiros but not cruzeiros into dollars.

I had planned to stay in Brazil for about ten days after the congress—either to rent a cheap room somewhere around the Copacabana, go to the beach, bathe, and get a suntan, or else to take a trip to Bahia and try to sail up the Amazon River, and then on to Cuzco, and from Cuzco—to Lima, and then back to New York. But the money was stolen, and although I could have gotten five hundred from American Express, I did not do it. That continent, and that country in particular, do interest me, but I am afraid that, as it is, I've seen more of this world than I've digested. The state of my health wasn't a consideration; at worst, it was a hindrance. After all, it would have been quite amusing for a Russian author to kick the bucket in the jungle: this hadn't happened in a while. But my ignorance as regards South American matters is so immense that even the most disastrous expe­rience probably could not have enlightened me by one iota. There is something revolting in all this drifting along the surface, a camera in your hands, with no particular goal in mind. In the nineteenth century one could still do a Jules Verne or a Humboldt: in the twentieth, flora and fauna should be left to their own devices. In any case, I have seen the Southern Cross, and the young moon flat on its back. As to the destitution of the favelas—may the ones capable offorgiving forgive me for remarking that it, the destitution, is in tune with the uniqueness of the local landscape. Against such a backdrop, the ocean and the mountains, the social drama is looked at askance, and not by the spectators only but by the victims as well. Beauty always renders reality somewhat senseless; here beauty constitutes reality's major part.

A nervous person should not, and in fact cannot, keep a diary. Of course, I would prefer to arrest, or retain, some­thing of these seven days—if only those kebabs, so mon­strous in their volume (churrasco rodizio)—but by the second day I already felt like packing, like going back to New York. Of course, Rio is more chic than Sochi, the Cote d'Azur, Palm Beach, or Miami, regardless ofthe thick shroud of exhaust fumes, all the more unbearable in the local heat. But—and this may be the most important point—the es­sence of all my travels (their side effect, rather, turning into their essence) is in returning here, to Morton Street—in a more and more minute elaboration of the new meaning in- 70 / J О S E PH B R О D S K Y

vested in my notion of "home." The more often you return to it, the more real this doghouse becomes. And the more abstract are the lands and waters I sashay through. I will probably never return to Liteynyi 27, and 44 Morton is but a last-ditch attempt to get away from perceiving the world as a one-way street.

After victory in the battle for the Annamites-in-exile, it emerged that it was Samantha's birthday—she was either thirty-five or forty-five; and Ulrich with his wife, ditto Fer­nando B., Samantha with the Great Translator (he may after all have indeed been the main writer among us, for the reputation of this whole continent rested precisely on him) went to the restaurant to celebrate. Stupefied by alcohol, I began to pester the Great Translator regarding his living merchandise—to the effect that they all, like the nineteenth- century gringos, for instance, plundered from our European brethren, plus, of course, the gringos themselves, with a touch of local color. That One Hundred Years of Solitude is just another Thomas Wolfe, whom (wasn't it unfortunate!) I'd happened to read right before the Hundred Years; the sense of "overcongestedness" was instantly recognizable. The Great Translator cozily and lazily was fending me off, saying yes, sure, there is an inevitable longing for the world culture, our European fellows themselves are not without this sin, and as for my own Eurasians, they are more guilty than most. That psychoanalysis had not yet taken root under the equator, and therefore his charges are still permitted to fantasize about themselves there, unlike, say, the gringos these days. Squeezed between Samantha and his uncom­prehending spouse, Ulrich declared that modernism was the true culprit, and that after its rarefactions the reader gets a craving for real chow and all these Hispanic spices, etc., and that, generally, Borges was one thing and all this cheerful psychedelic blather was something else. "And Cortazar," I added. "]a, Borges and Cortazar," said Ulrich, rolling his eyes toward Samantha, because he was wearing shorts and Samantha's hand was moving into them under the table from the left, unaware that the spouse was after the same goods from the right. "Borges and Cortazar," Ulrich repeated. Then, out of the blue, the other German duo pops up, quite high, and entices the salvaged wife, the Great Translator, and the Portuguese couple away to some party, while Sa- mantha, Ulrich, and I shuffle back toward the Gloria along the Copacabana. In the process they both take off all their clothes and wade into the ocean, where they disappear sharks only know for how long, while I sit on the empty beach guarding their stuff and hiccuping; and I have the sensation that all this' has already happened to me at some point in the past.

A drunk, especially a foreigner, especially a Russian, especially at night, is always a little concerned whether he will be able to find his way back to his hotel, and this concern gradually makes him sober.

In my room at the Gloria—rather chic by any standard (I was, after all, an honorary member of the American dele- gation)—there was a huge, lake-like mirror, dark and made almost velvet by thick reddish duckweed. It did not so much reflect as absorb what was happening in the room, and often, particularly in the dark, I seemed to myself like a naked perch slowly meandering in it, among the weeds, now sub­merging, now approaching the surface, now submerging again. This sensation was much stronger than the reality of the sessions, chatting with the delegates, attending press conferences, as though all these eventswere occurring some­where in the background, at the bottom, knee-deep in silt. Perhaps this had to do with the naggingly hot weather,

72 I J О s E p H B R О D s K Y

against which this lake was a subconscious refuge, since air conditioning at the Gloria was nonexistent. Anyhow, de­scending to the conference hall, or going out to the city, I had to make an effort, as though putting my eyesight man­ually into focus—as well as my mind, and ear, in order to tear my mind off that glass. Something like that happens with verses, pursuing you relentlessly although totally unrelated to the present moment—with your own or with someone else's, more often with someone else's; and with English even more frequently than Russian, especially with Auden's. The lines are just another kind of seaweed, and your memory is like a perch meandering among them. On the other hand, perhaps this impression could be explained by an unwitting narcissism, one's image acquiring in the mirror, thanks to the decaying amalgam, a shade of detachment, a certain extemporal savor; for the essence of any reflection is interest not so much in one's own person as in the very fact of viewing oneself from without. As for my Nordic distraction, all this was somewhat alien to her, and her interest in the mirror was briskly female and a touch pornographic: twisting her neck, she scrutinized the process or, rather, her enterprising self at it—in any case, not the weeds, or, moreover, the perch. To the left and to the right of the lake hung two color lithographs showing mango harvesting by half-dressed Ne­gresses and a panoramic view of Cairo. Below mooned the gray of a broken TV set.

Among the delegates there were two remarkably scummy specimens: an old female stoolie from Bulgaria and a degen­erate elderly literary critic from the DDR. She spoke En­glish, he German and French, and as a result, on hearing them speechify, one (or at least I) had a most extraordinary sense of the soiling of civilization. It was particularly painful to listen to all this homeland-made drivel in English, since

English is somehow entirely unfit for this stuff—although, who knows, some hundred years ago one might have had the same reaction in Russian. I did not retain their names: she was sort of Rosa Khlebh-like, a major in the reserves, I guess: gray dress, poring over the files, thick spectacles, always on duty. He was even better, though: a critic with a clearance, more a windbag than a scribbler—with out­put at best something like "The Style of the Early Johannes Becher" (who penned that sonnet upon Stalin's seventieth birthday beginning with the words "I was awakened today by the sound of a thousand nightingales singing simultane­ously . . ." Eine tausend Nachtigallen . . .). When I got up to mumble something on behalf of the Annamites, those two started booing, and the Deutsche Demokratische even in­quired of the Presidium what country I represented. Then, apres voting on the Vietnamese matter, this shitface ambles toward me and starts something like "But we do not know their literature, and can you really read that language of theirs anyhow, and we are Europeans, after all, aren't we," and so on. To this I reply that Indochina's population is n times larger than that of the Demokratische and the non- Demokratische put together, so chances are it harbors some equivalents of Anna Seghers und Stefan Zweig. On the whole, though, this kind of act reminds one mostly of the Gypsies at a country fair, who corner you and, screwing your territorial imperative, dive straight into your muzzle, which is something you allow only to your ex, and not too often at that! Cause who spares anything from a distance? Those guys, too, grab you by the button, roll their r's as if this were Trocadero, and flash their Italian-framed glasses. The Con­tinental crowd melts down on the spot, because it's polemics, mumbo-jumbo, a quote from either Feuerbach or Hegel, or some other bearded windbag, a shock of gray hair, and a total high from their own cadences and logic.

Afrostan goes in for that, too, even more so than the Europeans. There was a lot of it here—from Senegal, Cote d'lvoire, and I don't recall anymore where else. The polished ebony pates, portly frames, in super fabrics, loafers from Balenciaga, etc., with Parisian experience under their belts, because it's no life for the Left Bank gauchiste if she never had a revolutionary Negro from the Third World—and that's where their action was, since the local fellahs and Bedouins cut no ice with them, not to mention the Annamites. "Your colored brothers are suffering," I wail. "No," they answer, "we have already cut a deal with the Deutsche Demokra- tische, and Leopold Sedar Senghor himself told us not to." On the other hand, had this congress been held not in Rio but among pine trees and squirrels—who knows—maybe they would have cackled differently. Here, of course, every­thing was too familiar—palms and lianas, vociferous parrots. Perhaps the pale-face latitudes are a more suitable venue for such displays of guilt and compassion, late as these usually are. Or perhaps an underdog, once well fed, barks no dif­ferently from the top dog. Or, at any rate, craves a leash.

The lousiest were the moments when all this caused aches here and there, left of the sternum; in general, when something goes bust in an Englishless place, I feel most uncomfortable. As Auden used to say, Most of all I dread croaking at some big hotel to the consternation of the per­sonnel. That's how, I suppose, it's going to happen neverthe­less, and the papers will be left in awful disarray, but one does not think about this although one should. And one does not think about it not because one does not feel like thinking this way but because that thing—let's call it nonexistence, though a shorter noun could easily be found—does not want one to divulge its secrets, and scares one out of pondering them with its proximity. So even later, when, after getting scared and after getting over it, you think about this, you write nothing down anyway. Generally it is odd that the mind turns itself from an ally, which it should be at the moment of going bust, into a fifth column, reducing one's resistance, not that high to begin with. And one ponders not how to get out of this bind but contemplates, rather, one's own mind-painted scenes of the final macabre. I was lying on my back at the Gloria, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the nitro to take effect and for the appearance of my Nordic escort, who had only the beach on her mind. But at least I had finally gotten my way, and my Annamite section was approved, after which the teeny-weeny Vietnamese woman, tears in her eyes, thanked us on behalf of all her people, saying that should I ever go to Australia, whence, pooling pennies, they had sent her to Rio, I'd get a royal reception and be treated to kangaroo-ear stew. I bought myself nothing of Brazilian manufacture but ajar of talcum powder, because, roaming around the city, I had chafed tender tissue.

The best were our night exchanges with Ulrich at the bar, where a local thumper extracted from a keyboard, with feel­ing, "La Comparsita" and "El Choclo" (the real name of which is known in Russia as "The Argentine Tango"), but failed miserably with "Colonel Bogey." The reason—his southern, different, sentimental (though not devoid of bru­tality) temperament: no knack for cold negation. During one of our conversations—about the devil knows what—Karl Krauss, I think—my Nordic charge—well, let's call her Stella Polaris—joined us, and ten minutes later, not getting the drift and raving mad because of that, started gushing something for which I nearly punched her in the nose. It's illuminating to watch a little beast wake up in a person, a beast dormant under normal circumstances. With Stella, it was evidently a skunk, and it was extremely absorbing to watch the little weasel rouse itself inside a creature who, just one hour before, had been rustling thoroughly docu­mented papers and uttering Latinate sentences into a mike, urbi et orbi. I recall a charming straw-colored dress with a dark blue pattern on it, and a bright red gown in the morn­ing—and the rabid hatred of an animal that begins to realize that it is an animal at 2 a.m. Well, it wouldn't be evolution if it didn't swing back and forth. The tango's twangs, a few couples whispering in the dark, sweet schnapps, and a puz­zled look on Ulrich's face. The rascal was no doubt pondering where it would be better to land now—in his salvaged mar­riage, or with Samantha, who had a natural crush on the educated European.

At the conclusion of the big event, the city fathers threw a reception with liquor and petits fours at the Cultural Cen­ter, which, for all its avant-garde architecture, was light- years away from Rio. On the way there, and even more so in the chartered bus on the way back, the polygon slowly began changing its contours, thanks to M.S., who proved to be a true ethnographer, laying siege to one of the local in­terpreter girls. Then delegates started leaving. The Nordic Star betook herself to the Land of Silver, and I arrived in the lobby too late to say goodbye to her. The triangle (Ulrich, his spouse, and S.) were heading for Bahia, and then up the Amazon River, and from there—to Cuzco. The intoxicated Germans went homeward, and I, without a buck, clutching at my chest, with a broken pulse, to my own place of resi­dence. The night before, the Portuguese guy (who had dragged us to some local ritual that he tried to sell as voodoo but that in efl'ect was a regular pagan version of mass puri­fication in a working-class—and nightmarish at that—neigh- borhood: clotted vegetation, monotonous wailing from a catatonic choir, and all this in a school auditorium, with holy lithographs, warm Coca-Cola, horrible sore-barnacled dogs, and no cab in sight for return), with his skinny, tall, and jealous wife, went to some peninsula known to him only, since he spoke the local tongue, where healers do miracles restoring potency. Though every country is nothing but a continuation of space, there is in these Third World places a certain specific despair, their own particular hopelessness; the mass debilitation carried out in other parts by state se­curity is ensured here by poverty.

What it boils down to is that I didn't see the place. I wonder whether I even saw what I remember myself looking at. Cardiac cases perhaps shouldn't be allowed to travel by air precisely for this reason: their perceptive ability is clouded as it is by their internal state. To say the least, their focus is elsewhere. But who can resist a round-trip offer, especially if the destination is exotic. On the other hand, a round trip is an awful psychological trap: the return portion robs you of any chance of psychological investment in the place. The best outcome of such travel is a snapshot of your sweet self against some corny backdrop, and indeed Stella Polaris and I took several pictures of each other in the Botanical Garden. Still, the camera was hers. \Vhich spares me at least one more, albeit small, indignity, removing thus one more, per­haps the last, proof of my ever having been to Brazil.

Have I? \Vas I really there? In the end, I think I should say yes—if only because it makes no difference whatsoever whether I was there or not, and it's always better to admit your own insignificance than to deny it. There are no ob­jective criteria to judge the value of one's life, to begin with; but nothing diminishes it more than its exposure to extraor­dinary vistas and big crowds. In short, to space. In the end, perhaps that's why one travels, why one rubs one's pupils, shoulders, and navels against strangers. Perhaps the name of the whole game is humility, and fatigue setting into the bone is that virtue's true voice. At any rate, this is the voice

78 I J 0 s E p H B R 0 D s K Y

that tells me that I've been to Brazil. There is no other trace. Even those four hundred bucks are by now all spent by the thief; even the Annamite writers in Australia have gotten used to the legitimacy of their gatherings and have by now, I imagine, the appropriate stationery. It's strange to partake in something that results in the uncertainty of recollection, but to ask for more would be pure hubris.

Likewise, nothing of value escaped from under my pen: no immortal lyric. One wishes one could produce something on the spot, like a journalist or a painter, but one is seldom that lucky, and I wasn't. Behind nulla deis sine linea looms the realization that one has gobbled up at lunch more than one earns in a week. The solution lies in inventing an idiom that would allow production on a daily basis (like Berryman's Dream Songs or Lowell's History), though there is the threat of becoming a chatterbox. Well, guilt is a better vehicle in this business of scribbling than confidence. And, I guess, a better tenor, too. In any case, among the notes that survived the trip there are several stanzas of a Rio Samba: doggerel, really, but some rhymes aren't so bad:

Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.

Grow a mustache and change your bio.

Here the rich get richer, the poor get poorer,

here each old man is a Stunnbahnfuhrer.

Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.

There is no other city with such brio.

There are phones by Siemens, and even Jews

drive around like crazy in VWs.

Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.

Here Urania rules and no trace of Clio.

Buildings ape Corbusier's beehive-cum-waffle, though this time you can't blame this on the Luftwaffe.

Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.

Here every bird sings "O sole mio."

So do fish when caught, so do proud snow geese

in midwinter here, in Portuguese.

Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.

It's the Third World all right, so they still read Leo

Trotsky, Guevara, and other sirens;

still, the backwardness spares them the missile silos.

Come to Rio, oh come to Rio. If you come in duo, you may leave in trio. If you come alone, you'll leave with a zero in your thoughts as valuable as one cruzeiro.

This, of course, could have been written without my leaving Manhattan. As quite a lot of far better stuff was written, even by me. Guilt, as I said, is a better vehicle. Still, I've dipped myself into the southern Atlantic and in general insinuated my body into what until then was just a high-school geog­raphy lesson. Ergo sum.

I was also entertained there by a local pharmacist, a native of Yugoslavia who had fought either against the Ger­mans or against the Italians, and who was clutching at his chest almost as often as I was. As it happened, he had read almost everything I'd penned; he promised to get me a Baby Hermes with my favorite typeface, and he treated at a chur- rascaria at the Leblon beach. When I meet people like him, I feel like an impostor, because what they think I am does not exist (from the moment I finished writing what they just finished reading). What exists is a haunted lunatic trying

8o I J o s E P H B R o D s K Y

hard not to hurt anyone—because the main thing is not literature but the ability not to cause pain to anyone; but instead of owning up to this, I babble something about Kan- temir, Derzhavin, and the like, while they listen with an open mouth, as if there were something else in the world besides despair, neurosis, and the fear of going up in smoke any second. But perhaps even official messengers of Russian culture—of a certain age especially—feel the same way, par­ticularly when they drag their bones across all kinds of Mo- gadishus and Ivory Coasts. Because everywhere there is dust, rusty soil, twisted chunks ofdecaying metal, unfinished buildings, the swarthy multitudes of the local population for whom you mean nothing, just like for your own. Sometimes, far away, you can see the blue shine of the sea.

No matter which way journeys begin, they always end identically: in one's own corner, in one's own bed, falling into which you forget what has already become the past. It is unlikely I will ever find myself again in that country and in that hemisphere, but at least, upon my return, my bed is even more "mine," and for a person who buys furniture instead of inheriting it, this is enough to detect a sense of purpose in the most pointless meanderings.

1978

(Translated, from the Russian, by Alexander Sumerkin and the author)

Altra Ego

I

The idea o⁽the poet as an inveterate Don Giovanni is of relatively recent coinage. Like many concepts enjoying great currency in the popular imagination, it appears to be a by­product of the Industrial Revolution, which, through its quantum leaps in human accumulation and literacy, gave birth to the very phenomenon of the popular imagination. To put it differently, this image of the poet appears to owe more to the public success of Lord Byron's Don Juan than to its author's own romantic record—awe-inspiring perhaps, but unavailable to the public at the time. Besides, for every Byron we always get a \Vordsworth.

As the last period of social coherence and its attendant philistinism, the nineteenth century is responsible for the bulk of notions and attitudes we entertain or are guided by today. In poetry, that century squarely belongs to France; and perhaps the expansive gesturing and exotic affinities of the French Romantics and Symbolists contributed to the dim view of the poet no less than the general lowbrow notion of the French as certified immoralists. On the whole, under­neath this bad-mouthing of poets lies the instinctive desire

Bz I J o s E PH B R o D s K Y

of every social order—be it a democracy, autocracy, theoc­racy, ideocracy, or bureaucracy—to compromise or belittle the authority of poetry, which, apart from rivaling that of the state, hoists a question mark over the individual himself, over his achievements and mental security, over his very significance. In that respect the nineteenth century simply joined the club: when it comes to poetry, every bourgeois is a Plato.

II

Antiquity's attitude toward a poet was, however, by and large both more exalted and more sensible. That had to do as much with polytheism as with the fact that the public had to rely on poets for entertainment. Save for mutual snip- ing—usual in the literary trade of any age—disparaging treatment of poets in antiquity is rare. On the contrary, poets were revered as figures of divine proximity: in the public imagination they stood somewhere between soothsayers and demigods. Indeed, deities themselves were often their au­dience, as is evidenced by the myth of Orpheus.

Nothing could be further from Plato than this myth, which is also particularly illuminating about antiquity's view of a poet's sentimental integrity. Orpheus is no Don Gio­vanni. So distraught is he by the death ofhis wife, Eurydice, that his lamentations rend the ears of the Olympians, who grant him permission to go down into the netherworld to bring her back. That nothing comes of this trip (followed in poetry by similar descents in Homer, Virgil, and, above all, in Dante) only proves the intensity of the poet's feeling for his beloved, as well, of course, as the ancients' grasp of the nitty-gritty of guilt.

As much as the subsequent fate of Orpheus (he was torn apart by a crowd of angry maenads for his refusal—because of his vow of chastity, made in mourning for Eurydice—to submit himself to their bared charms), this intensity points up the monogamous nature of at least this poet's passion. Although, unlike the monotheists of later periods, the an­cients didn't put much of a premium on monogamy, it should be noted that they didn't run to the opposite extreme either, and reserved fidelity as the particular virtue of their premier poet. In general, apart from the beloved, the only feminine presence on a poet's agenda in antiquity was that of his Muse.

The two would overlap in the modern imagination; in antiquity they didn't because the Muse was hardly corporeal. The daughter ofZeus and Mnemosyne (the goddess of mem­ory), she had nothing palpable about her; the only way she would reveal herself to a mortal, particularly a poet, was through her voice: by dictating to him this or that line. In other words, she was the voice of the language; and what a poet actually listens to, what really does dictate to him the next line, is the language. And it is presumably the language's own gender in Greek (glossa) that accounts for the Muse's femininity.

With the same allusive consequences, the noun for lan­guage is feminine in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and German. In English, however, language is an "it"; in Russian it is "he." Yet whatever language's gender happens to be, a poet's attachment to it is monogamous, for a poet, by trade at least, is a monoglot. It could even be argued that all one's capacity for fidelity gets spent on one's Muse, as is implied in the Byronic version of the poet's romantic program—but that would be true only if one's language were indeed one's

84 / J 0 S E PH B R 0 D S K Y

choice. As it is, language is the given, and knowledge of which hemisphere of the brain pertains to the Muse would be of value only if one could control that part of one's anatomy.

IV

The Muse, therefore, is not an alternative to the beloved but precedes her. In fact, as an "older woman," the Muse, nee language, plays a decisive part in the sentimental de­velopment of a poet. She is responsible not only for his emotional makeup but often for the very choice ofhis object of passion and the manner of its pursuit. It is she who makes him fanatically single-minded, turning his love into an equiv­alent of her own monologue. What amounts in sentimental matters to obstinacy and obsession is essentially the dictate of the Muse, whose choice is always of an aesthetic origin and discards alternatives. In a manner of speaking, love is always a monotheistic experience.

Christianity, of course, hasn't failed to capitalize on this. Yet what really binds a religious mystic to a pagan sensualist, Gerard Manley Hopkins to Sextus Propertius, is emotional absolutism. The intensity of that emotional absolutism is such that at times it overshoots anything that lies near, and often one's very target. As a rule, the nagging, idiosyncratic, self- referential, persistent voice of the Muse takes a poet beyond imperfect and perfect unions alike, beyond utter disasters and paroxysms ofhappiness—at the expense of reality, with or without a real, reciprocating girl in it. In other words, the pitch gets higher for its own sake, as if the language propels a poet, especially a romantic, whence it came, where in the beginning there was a word, or a discernible sound. Hence many a broken marriage, hence many a lengthy poem, hence poetry's metaphysical affinities, for every word wants to return to where it came from, if only as an echo, which is the mother of rhyme. Hence, too, the reputation of the poet as a rake.

v

Among the many agents of the public's spiritual debilitation, it is the voyeuristic genre of biography that takes the cake. That there are far more ruined maidens than immortal lyrics seems to give pause to nobody. The last bastion of realism, biography is based on the breathtaking premise that art can be explained by life. To follow this logic, The Song of Roland should have been penned by Bluebeard (well, by Gilles de Rais, at least) and Faust by Frederick of Prussia—or, if you like him better, Humboldt.

What a poet has in common with his less articulate fellows is that his life is hostage to his metier, not the other way around. And it is not just that he gets paid for his words (seldom and meagerly): the point is that he also pays for them (often horrifically). It is the latter that creates confusion and spawns biographies, because this payment takes the form not only of indifi'erence; ostracism, imprisonment, exile, ob­livion, self-disgust, uncertainty, remorse, madness; a variety of addictions is also acceptable currency. These things are obviously describable. They are, however, not the cause of one's penmanship but its effect. To put it crassly, in order to make his work sell, as well as to avoid cliche, our poet continually has to get where nobody has ever been before —mentally, psychologically, or lexically. Once he gets there, he discovers that indeed there's nobody about, save perhaps the word's original meaning or that initial discernible sound.

This takes its toll. The longer he is at it—at uttering something hitherto unutterable—the more idiosyncratic his conduct becomes. Revelations and insights obtained by him in the process may lead him either to an upsurge of hubris or—more likely—to a deepening of his humility before the force that he surmises behind those insights and revelations. He may also be afflicted by a belief that, older and more viable than anything, language imparts to him, its mouth­piece, its wisdom and the knowledge of the future alike. No matter how gregarious or humble he is by nature, this sort of thing boxes him even further out of the social context, which desperately tries to reclaim him by running its com­mon denominator through his groin.

VI

This is done on account of the Muse's alleged femininity (even when the poet happens to be a woman). The real reason, though, is that art survives life, and this unpalatable realization lies behind the lumpen desire to subordinate the former to the latter. The finite always mistakes the perma­nent for the infinite and nurtures designs upon it. That, of course, is the permanent's own fault, for it cannot help at times behaving like the finite. Even the most misogynistic or misanthropic poet produces a spate of love lyrics, if only as a token of allegiance to the guild, or as an exercise. This is enough to occasion research, textual exegesis, psychoan­alytical interpretation, and whatnot. The general scheme goes like this: the femininity of the Muse presupposes the masculinity of the poet. The masculinity of the poet presup­poses the femininity of the lover. Ergo: the lover is the Muse, or could be called that. Another ergo: a poem is the subli­mation of the author's erotic urges and should be treated as such. Simple.

That Homer must have been fairly frail by the time he wrote the Odyssey and that Goethe, when he got to the second part of Faust, definitely was, is of no consequence.

What, on the whole, should we do with epic poets? And how can one sublimating so much remain a rake? Since we seem to be saddled with the term, perhaps it would be civilized to assume that both artistic and erotic activities are expres­sions of one's creative energy, that both are a sublimation. As for the Muse, that angel oflanguage, that "'older woman," it would be best ifbiographers and the public left her alone, and if they can't they should at least remember that she is older than any lover or mother, and that her voice is more implacable than the mother tongue. She's going to dictate to a poet no matter where, how, or when he lives, and if not to this poet, then to the next one—partly because living and writing are different occupations (that's what the two different verbs are for) and to equate them is more absurd than to separate them, for literature has a richer past than any individual, whatever his pedigree.

VII

"To a man, a girl's visage is of course a visage of his soul," wrote a Russian poet, and that's what lies behind the exploits ofTheseus or St. George, the quests of Orpheus and Dante. The sheer cumbersomeness of those undertakings bespeaks a motive other than lust alone. In other words, love is a metaphysical affair whose goal is either accomplishing or liberating one's soul: winnowing it from the chaff of exis­tence. That is and always has been the core of lyric poetry.

A maiden, in short, is one's soul's stand-in, and one zeroes in on her precisely because one is not given an al­ternative, save perhaps in a mirror. In the era we call mod­ern, both a poet and his public have grown accustomed to short takes. Still, even in this century there have been enough exceptions whose thoroughness in treating the sub­ject rivals that of Petrarch. One can cite Akhmatova, one can

88 I J О s E PH B R О D s K Y

cite Montale, one can cite the "dark pastorals" of Robert Frost or Thomas Hardy. These are quests for the soul, in the form of lyric poetry. Hence the singularity of the ad­dressee and the stability of the manner, or style. Often the career of a poet, ifhe lives long enough, emerges as a genre variation on a single theme, helping us to distinguish the dancer from the dance—in this case, a love poem from love as such. If a poet dies young, the dancer and the dance tend to merge. This leads to an awful terminological confusion and bad press for the participants, not to mention their purpose.

VIII

Ifonly because a love poem is more often than not an applied art (i.e., it's written to get the girl), it takes an author to an emotional and, quite likely, a linguistic extreme. As a result, he emerges from such a poem knowing himself—his psy­chological and stylistic parameters—better than before, which explains the popularity of the genre among its prac­titioners. Also, sometimes the author gets the girl.

Practical application notwithstanding, what makes love lyrics abound is simply that they are a product ofsentimental necessity. Triggered by a particular addressee, this necessity may stay proportionate to that addressee, or develop an au­tonomous dynamic and volume, prompted by the centrifugal nature of language. The consequence of the latter may be either a cycle of love poems addressed to the same person or a number of poems fanning out, as it were, in different directions. The choice here—if one can speak of choice where necessity is at work—is not so much moral or spiritual as stylistic, and depends on a poet's longevity. And here's where a stylistic choice—if one can speak of choice where chance and the passage of time are at play—starts to smell of spiritual consequences. For ultimately a love lyric, by necessity, is a narcissistic affair. It is a statement, however imaginative, of the author's own feeling, and as such it amounts to a self-portrait rather than to one of his beloved or her world. Were it not for sketches, oils, miniatures, or snapshots, having read a poem, we often wouldn't have known what—or more to the point, whom—it was all about. Even provided with them, we don't learn much about the beauties they depict, save that they looked different from their bards and that not all of them qualify in our eyes as beauties. But then a picture seldom complements words, or vice versa. Besides, images of souls and magazine covers are bound to have different standards. For Dante, at least, the notion of beauty was contingent on the beholder's ability to discern in the human face's ovaljust seven letters comprising the term Homo Dei.

IX

The crux of the matter is that their actual appearances are irrelevant and were not supposed to be registered. What was supposed to be registered is the spiritual accomplish­ment which is the ultimate proof of the poet's existence. A picture is a bonus only to him, perhaps to her; to a reader it is practically a minus, for it subtracts from the imagination. For a poem is a mental affair: for its reader as much as for its author. "Her" portrait is the poet's state conveyed through his tune and choice of words; a reader would be a fool to settle for less. \Vhat matters about "her" is not her partic­ularity but her universality. Don't try to find her snapshot and position yourself next to it: it won't work. Plain and simply, a love lyric is one's soul set in motion. If it's good, it may do the same to you.

It is otherness, therefore, that provides the metaphys­ical opportunity. A love lyric may be good or bad but it offers its writer an extension of himself—or, if a lyric is excep­tionally good, or an affair is long, self-negation. What is the Muse up to while this is going on? Not much, since a love lyric is dictated by existential necessity and necessity doesn't care much about the quality of articulation. As a rule, love lyrics are done fast and don't undergo much revision. But once a metaphysical dimension is attained, or at least once self-negation is attained, one indeed can tell the dancer from the dance: a love lyric from love and, thus, from a poem about, or informed by, love.

X

Now, a poem about love doesn't insist on the author's own reality and seldom employs the word "I." It is about what a poet is not, about what he perceives as different from him­self. If it is a mirror, it is a small one, and placed too far away. To recognize oneself in it requires, apart from hu­mility, a lens whose power of resolution doesn't distinguish between observing and being mesmerized. A poem about love can have for its subject practically anything: the girl's features, ribbons in her hair, the landscape behind her house, the passage of clouds, starry skies, some inanimate object. It may have nothing to do with the girl; it can describe an exchange between two or more mythic characters, a wilted bouquet, snow on the railroad platform. The readers, though, will know that they are reading a poem informed by love thanks to the intensity of attention paid to this or that detail of the universe. For love is an attitude toward reality—usually of someone finite toward something infinite. Hence, the intensity caused by the sense of the provisional nature of one's possessions. Hence, that intensity's need for articulation. Hence, its quest for a voice less provisional than one's own. And in walks the Muse, that older woman, me­ticulous about possessions.

XI

Pasternak's famous exclamation "Great god oflove, great god of details!" is poignant precisely because of the utter insig­nificance of the sum of these details. A ratio could no doubt be established between the smallness of the detail and the intensity of attention paid to it, as well as between the latter and one's spiritual accomplishment, because a poem—any poem, regardless of its subject—is in itself an act of love, not so much of an author for his subject as of language for a piece of reality. If it is often tinged with an elegiac air, with the timbre of pity, this is so because it is the love of the greater for the lesser, of the permanent for the transitory. This surely doesn't affect a poet's romantic conduct, since he, a physical entity, identifies himself more readily with the provisional than with the eternal. All he may know is that when it comes to love, art is a more adequate form of expression than any other; that on paper one can reach a higher degree of lyricism than on bedroom linen.

Were it otherwise, we would have far less art on our hands. The way martyrdom or sainthood prove not so much the substance of a creed as the human potential for belief, so love poetry speaks for art's ability to overshoot reality— or to escape it entirely. Perhaps the true measure of this kind of poetry is precisely its inapplicability to reality, the impossibility of translating its sentiment into action for want of physical equivalence to abstract insight. The physical world must take offense at this kind of criterion. But, then, it has photography—not quite an art yet, but capable of arresting the abstract in flight, or at least in progress.

92 I J О s E PH B R О D s K Y

XII

And a while ago, in a small garrison town in the north of Italy, I chanced on an attempt to do precisely this: to depict poetry's reality by means of the camera. It was a small exhibi­tion consisting of photographs of thirty or so great twentieth- century poets' beloveds—wives, mistresses, concubines, boys, men. It started in fact with Baudelaire and ended with Pessoa and Montale; next to each beloved, a famous lyric was attached, in its original language and in translation. A fortunate idea, I thought, shuffling past the glass-covered stands that contained the black-and-white full faces, profiles, and three-quarter profiles of bards and ofwhat amounted to their own or their languages' destinies. There they were— a flock of rare birds caught in the net of that gallery, and one could indeed regard them as art's points of departure from reality, or better still, as reality's means of transpor­tation toward that higher degree of lyricism, toward a poem. (After all, for one's fading and generally moribund features, art is another kind of future.)

Not that the women (and some men) depicted there lacked the psychological, visual, or erotic qualities required to forge a poet's happiness: on the contrary, they appeared sufficiently if variously endowed. Some were wives, others mistresses and lovers, still others lingered in a poet's mind while their appearance in his quarters may have been rather fleeting. Of course, given the mind-boggling variety of what nature can paint into a human oval, one's choice ofa beloved appears arbitrary. The usual factors—genetic, historical, so­cial, aesthetic—narrow the range, for the poet as for every­one else. Yet perhaps the particular prerequisite for a poet's choice is the presence in that oval of a certain nonfunctional air, an air of ambivalence and open-endedness, echoing, as it were, in flesh and blood the essence of his endeavor.

That's what such epithets as "enigmatic," "dreamy," or "otherworldly" normally struggle to denote, and what ac­counts for the preponderance in that gallery of visually alea- toric blondes over the excessive precision of brunettes. By and large, at any rate, this characteristic, vague as it is, did apply to the birds of passage caught in that particular net. Conscious of the camera or taken unawares, those faces ap­peared to carry in one way or another a common expression of being elsewhere, or having their mental focus somewhat blurred. The next moment, of course, they would be en­ergetic, alert, supine, lascivious, bearing a child or elop­ing with a friend, bloody-minded or suffering a bard's infidelity—in short, more definite. For an instant of expo­sure, though, they were their tentative, indefinite selves, which, like-a poem in progress, didn't yet have a next line or, very often, a subject. Also like poems, they were never finished: they were only abandoned. In short, they were drafts.

It is mutability, then, that animates a face for a poet, that reverberates almost palpably in Yeats's famous lines:

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

That a reader can empathize with these lines proves him to be as susceptible to the appeal of mutability as the poet. More exactly, the degree of his lyrical appreciation here is the degree to which he is removed from that very mutability, the degree to which he is confined to the definite: features or circumstances or both. With the poet, he discerns in that changing oval far more than just the seven letters of Homo Dei; he discerns there the entire alphabet, in all its com­binations, i.e., the language. That is how in the end the Muse perhaps indeed becomes feminine, how she gets pho­tographed. The Yeats quatrain sounds like a moment of rec­ognition of one form of life in another: of the poet's own vocal cords' tremolo in his beloved's mortal features, or un­certainty in uncertainty. To a vibrating voice, in other words, everything tentative and faltering is an echo, promoted at times to an alter ego or, as gender would have it, to an altra ego.

XIII

Gender imperatives notwithstanding, let's keep in mind that an altra ego is no Muse. Whatever solipsistic depths a carnal union may avail him, no poet ever mistakes his voice for its echo, the inner for the outer. The prerequisite of love is the autonomy of its object, preferably within arm's reach. The same goes for an echo that defines the range of one's voice. Those depicted in the exhibition—women and, moreover, men—were not themselves Muses, but their good stand- ins, inhabiting this side of reality and sharing with the older women their language. They were (or ended up being) other people's wives; actresses and dancers, schoolteachers, di­vorcees, nurses; they had a social station and thus could be defined, while the Muse's main trait—let me repeat it—is that she is undefinable. They were neurotic or serene, pro­miscuous or strict, religious or cynical, great dressers or slov­enly, highly sophisticated or barely literate. Some of them couldn't care less for poetry and would embrace a common cad more eagerly than an ardent admirer. On top of that, they lived in different lands, though at about the same time, spoke different tongues, and didn't know of each other. In short, nothing bound them together save that something they said or did at a certain moment triggered and set in motion the machinery of language, and it rolled along, leav­ing behind on paper "the best words in the best possible order." They were not Muses, because they made the Muse, the older woman, speak.

Caught in the gallery's net, I thought, these birds of bards' paradise had at least got their proper identification, if not actual rings. Like their bards, most of them were gone now, and gone were their guilty secrets, moments of tri­umph, substantial wardrobes, protracted malaises, and pe­culiar affinities. \Vhat remained was a song owing to the birds' capacity to flutter off no less than to the bards' to chirp, yet outlasting both—the way it will outlast its readers, who, for the moment of reading at least, share in a song's afterlife.

XI Y

Herein lies the ultimate distinction between the beloved and the Muse: the latter doesn't die. The same goes for the Muse and the poet: when he's gone, she finds herself another mouthpiece in the next generation. To put it another way, she always hangs around a language and doesn't seem to mind being mistaken for a plain girl. Amused by this sort of error, she tries to correct it by dictating to her charge now pages of Paradiso, now Thomas Hardy's poems of 1912-13; that is, those where the voice of human passion yields to that of linguistic necessity—but apparently to no avail. So let's leave her with a flute and a wreath of wildflowers. This way at least she might escape a biographer.

How to Read a Book

The idea of a book fair in the city where, a century ago, Nietzsche lost his mind has, in its own turn, a nice ring to it. A Mobius strip (commonly known as a vicious circle), to be precise, for several stalls in this book fair are occupied by the complete or selected works of this great German. On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future which we all prefer to regard as unending.

On the whole, books are indeed less finite than our­selves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors— mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust. Yet even this form of the future is better than the memory of a few surviving relatives or friends on whom one cannot rely, and often it is precisely the appetite for this posthumous dimension which sets one's pen in motion.

Delivered at the opening of the first book fair in Turin, Italy, in May ig88.

So as we toss and turn these rectangular objects in our hands—those in octavo, in quarto, in duodecimo, etc., etc.—we won't be terribly amiss if we surmise that we fon­dle in our hands, as it were, the actual or potential urns with our returning ashes. After all, what goes into writing a book—be it a novel, a philosophical treatise, a collec­tion of poems, a biography, or a thriller—is, ultimately, a man's only life: good or bad but always finite. Whoever said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book nobody gets younger.

Nor does one become any younger by reading one. Since this is so, our natural preference should be for good books. The paradox, however, lies in the fact that in liter­ature, as nearly everywhere, "good" is not an autonomous category: it is defined by its distinction from "bad." What's more, in order to write a good book, a writer must read a great deal of pulp—otherwise he won't be able to de­velop the necessary criteria. That's what may constitute bad literature's best defense at the Last Judgment; that's also the raison d'etre of the proceedings in which we take part today.

Since we are all moribund, and since reading books is time- consuming, we must devise a system that allows us a sem­blance of economy. Of course, there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge our­selves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake but to learn. Hence the need for concision, condensation, fusion—for the works that bring the human predicament, in all its diversity, into its sharpest possible focus; in other words, the need for a shortcut. Hence, too—as a by-product of our suspicion that such shortcuts exist (and they do, but about that later)—the need for some compass in the ocean of available printed matter.

The role of that compass, of course, is played by literary criticism, by reviewers. Alas, its needle oscillates wildly. What is north for some is south (South America, to be pre­cise) for others; the same goes in an even wilder degree for east and west. The trouble with a reviewer is (minimum) threefold: (a) he can be a hack, and as ignorant as ourselves; (b) he can have strong predilections for a certain kind of writing or simply be on the take with the publishing industry; and (c) if he is a writer of talent, he will turn his review writing into an independent art form—Jorge Luis Borges is a case in point—and you may end up reading reviews rather than the books themselves.

In any case, you find yourselves adrift in the ocean, with pages and pages rustling in every direction, clinging to a raft whose ability to stay afloat you are not so sure of. The al­ternative, therefore, would be to develop your own taste, to build your own compass, to familiarize yourself, as it were, with particular stars and constellations—dim or bright but always remote. This, however, takes a hell of a lot of time, and you may easily find yourself old and gray, heading for the exit with a lousy volume under your arm. Another alternative—or perhaps just a part of the same—is to rely on hearsay: a friend's advice, a reference caught in a text you happen to like. Although not institutionalized in any fashion (which wouldn't be such a bad idea), this kind of procedure is familiar to all of us from a tender age. Yet this, too, proves to be poor insurance, for the ocean of available literature swells and widens constantly, as this book fair am­ply testifies: it is yet another tempest in that ocean.

So where is one's terra firma, even though it may be but an uninhabitable island? Where is our good man Friday, let alone a Cheetah?

Before I come up with my suggestion—nay! what I perceive as being the only solution for developing sound taste in literature—I'd like to say a few words about this solution's source, i.e., about my humble self—not because of my per­sonal vanity, but because I believe that the value of an idea is related to the context in which it emerges. Indeed, had I been a publisher, I'd be putting on my books' covers not only their authors' names but also the exact age at which they composed this or that work, in order to enable their readers to decide whether the readers care to reckon with the information or the views contained in a book written by a man so much younger—or, for that matter, so much older—than themselves.

The source of the suggestion to come belongs to the category of people (alas, I can no longer use the term "gen­eration," which implies a certain sense of mass and unity) for whom literature has always been a matter of some hundred names; to the people whose social graces would make Robinson Crusoe or even Tarzan wince; to those who feel awkward at large gatherings, do not dance at parties, tend to find metaphysical excuses for adultery, and are fin­icky about discussing politics; the people who dislike them­selves far more than their detractors do; who still prefer alcohol and tobacco to heroin or marijuana—those who, in W. H. Auden's words, "one will not find on the barricades and who never shoot themselves or their lovers." If such people occasionally find themselves swimming in their blood on the floor of prison cells or speaking from a platform, it is because they rebel against (or, more precisely, object to) not some particular injustice but the order of the world as a whole. They have no illusions about the objectivity of the views they put forth; on the contrary, they insist on their unpardonable subjectivity right from the threshold. They act in this fashion, however, not for the purpose of shielding themselves from possible attack: as a rule, they are fully aware of the vulnerability pertinent to their views and the positions they defend. Yet—taking the stance somewhat op­posite to Darwinian—they consider vulnerability the pri­mary trait of living matter. This, I must add, has less to do with masochistic tendencies, nowadays attributed to almost every man of letters, than with their instinctive, often first­hand knowledge that extreme subjectivity, prejudice, and indeed idiosyncrasy are what help art to avoid cliche. And the resistance to cliche is what distinguishes art from life.

Now that you know the background of what I am about to say, I may just as well say it: The way to develop good taste in literature is to read poetry. If you think that I am speaking out of professional partisanship, that I am trying to advance my own guild interests, you are mistaken: I am no union man. The point is that being the supreme form of human locution, poetry is not only the most concise, the most condensed way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation—especially one on paper.

The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one be­comes of any sort of verbosity, be it in political or philo­sophical discourse, in history, social studies, or the art of fiction. Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction. A child of epitaph and epigram, conceived, it appears, as a shortcut to any conceivable subject matter, poetry is a great discipli­narian to prose. It teaches the latter not only the value of each word but also the mercurial mental patterns of the species, alternatives to linear composition, the knack ofomit- ting the self-evident, emphasis on detail, the technique of anticlimax. Above all, poetry develops in prose that appetite for metaphysics which distinguishes a work of art from mere belles lettres. It must be admitted, however, that in this particular regard, prose has proven to be a rather lazy pupil.

Please, don't get me wrong: I am not trying to debunk prose. The truth of the matter is that poetry simply happens to be older than prose and thus has covered a greater dis­tance. Literature started with poetry, with the song of a nomad that predates the scribblings of a settler. And al­though I have compared somewhere the difference between poetry and prose to that between the air force and the in­fantry, the suggestion that I make now has nothing to do with either hierarchy or the anthropological origins of lit­erature. All'I am trying to do is to be practical and spare your eyesight and brain cells a lot of useless printed matter. Poetry, one might say, has been invented for just this purpose—for it is synonymous with economy. \Vhat one should do, therefore, is recapitulate, albeit in miniature, the process that took place in our civilization over the course of two millennia. It is easier than you might think, for the body of poetry is far less voluminous than that of prose. What's more, if you are concerned mainly with contemporary lit­erature, then your job is indeed a piece of cake. All you have to do is arm yourselves for a couple of months with the works of poets in your mother tongue, preferably from the first half of this century. I suppose you'll end up with a dozen rather slim books, and by the end of the summer you will be in great shape.

If your mother tongue is English, I might recom­mend to you Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. If the language is German, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, Peter Huchel, and Gottfried Benn. Ifit is Span-

102 / J О S E PH B R О D S K Y

ish, Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Cer- nuda, Rafael Alberti, Juan Ramon Jimenez, and Octavio Paz will do. If the language is Polish—or if you know Polish (which would be to your great advantage, because the most extraordinary poetry of this century is written in that lan­guage)—I'd like to mention to you the names of Leopold Staff, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Wisfawa' Szymborska. If it is French, then of course Guillaume Apolli- naire, Jules Supervielle, Pierre Reverdy, Blaise Cendrars, some of Paul Eluard, a bit of Aragon, Victor Segalen, and Henri Michaux. Ifit is Greek, then you should read Constan- tine Cavafy, George Seferis, Yannis Ritsos. If it is Dutch, then it should be Martinus Nijhoff, particularly his stunning "Awater." If it is Portuguese, you should read Fernando Pessoa and perhaps Carlos Drummond de Andrade. If the language is Swedish, read Gunnar Ekelof, Harry Martinson, Tomas Transtromer. If it is Russian, it should be, to say the least, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akh­matova, Boris Pasternak, Vladislav Khodasevich, Velemir Khlebnikov, Nikolai Klyuev. If it is Italian, I don't presume to submit any name to this audience, and if I mention Quas­imodo, Saba, Ungaretti, and Montale, it is simply because I have long wanted to acknowledge my personal, private gratitude and debt to these four great poets whose lines influenced my life rather crucially, and I am glad to do so while standing on Italian soil.

If after going through the works of any of these, you drop a book of prose picked from the shelf, it won't be your fault. If you continue to read it, that will be to the author's credit; that will mean that this author has indeed something to add to the truth about our existence as it was known to these few poets just mentioned; this would prove at least that this author is not redundant, that his language has an independent energy or grace. Or else, it would mean that reading is your incurable addiction. As addictions go, it is not the worst one.

Let me draw a caricature here, for caricatures accentuate the essential. In this caricature I see a reader whose hvo hands are occupied with holding open books. In the left, he holds a collection of poems; in the right, a volume of prose. Let's see which he drops first. Of course, he may fill both his palms with prose volumes, but that will leave him with self-negating criteria. And, of course. he may also ask what distinguishes good poetry from bad, and where is his guar­antee that what he holds in his left hand is indeed worth bothering with.

Well, for one thing. what he holds in his left hand will be, in all likelihood, lighter than what he holds in the right. Second, poetr, as Montale once put it, is an incurably se­mantic art, and chances for charlatanism in it are extremely low. By the third line a reader will know what sort of thing he holds in his left hand, for poetry makes sense fast and the quality of language in it makes itself felt immediately. After three lines he may glance at what he has in the right.

This is, as I told you, a caricature. At the same time, I believe, this might be the posture many of you will unwit­tingly assume at this book fair. Make sure, at least, that the books in your hands belong to different genres of literature. Now, this shifting of eyes from left to right is, of course, a maddening enterprise; still, there are no horsemen on the streets ofTurin any longer, and the sight of a cabbie flogging his animal won't aggravate the state you will be in when you leave these premises. Besides, a hundred years hence, no­body's insanity will matter much to the multitudes whose number will exceed by far the total of little black letters in all the books at this book fair put together. So you may as well tn^r the little trick I've just suggested.

In Praise of Boredom

But should you fail to keep your kingdom And, like your father before you come Where thought accuses and feeling mocks, Believe your pain . . .

—W. H. Auden, "Alonso to Ferdinand"

A substantial part of what lies ahead of you is going to be claimed by boredom. The reason I'd like to talk to you about it today, on this lofty occasion, is that I believe no liberal arts college prepares you for that eventuality; Dartmouth is no exception. Neither humanities nor science offers courses in boredom. At best, they may acquaint you with the sen­sation by incurring it. But what is a casual contact to an incurable malaise? The worst monotonous drone coming from a lectern or the eye-splitting textbook in turgid English is nothing in comparison to the psychological Sahara that starts right in your bedroom and spurns the horizon.

Known under several aliases—anguish, ennui, tedium, doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, sto­lidity, lethargy, languor, accidie, etc.—boredom is a com­plex phenomenon and by and large a product of repetition. It would seem, then, that the best remedy against it would be constant inventiveness and originality. That is what you, young and newfangled, would hope for. Alas, life won't sup-

Delivered as a commencement address at Dartmouth College, in July 1^9.

ply you with that option, for life's main medium is precisely repetition.

One may argue, of course, that repeated attempts at originality and inventiveness are the vehicle of progress and—in the same breath—civilization. As benefits of hind­sight go, however, this one is not the most valuable. For should we divide the history of our species by scientific discoveries, not to mention ethical concepts, the result will not be in our favor. We'll get, technically speaking, centuries of boredom. The very notion of originality or innovation spells out the monotony of standard reality, of life, whose main medium—nay, idiom—is tedium.

In that, it—life—differs from art, whose worst enemy, as you probably know, is cliche. Small wonder, then, that art, too, fails to instruct you as to how to handle boredom. There are few novels about this subject; paintings are still fewer; and as for music, it is largely nonsemantic. On the whole, art treats boredom in a self-defensive, satirical fash­ion. The only way art can become for you a solace from boredom, from the existential equivalent of cliche, is if you yourselves become artists. Given your number, though, this prospect is as unappetizing as it is unlikely.

But even should you march out of this commencement in full force to typewriters, easels, and Steinway grands, you won't shield yourselves from boredom entirely. If repeti- tiveness is boredom's mother, you, young and newfangled, will be quickly smothered by lack of recognition and low pay, both chronic in the world of art. In these respects, writing, painting, composing music are plain inferior to working for a law firm, a bank, or even a lab.

Herein, of course, lies art's saving grace. Not being lucrative, it falls victim to demography rather reluctantly. For if, as we've said, repetition is boredom's mother, de­mography (which is to play in your lives a far greater role than any discipline you've mastered here) is its other parent. This may sound misanthropic to you, but I am more than twice your age, and I have lived to see the population of our globe double. By the time you're my age, it will have quad­rupled, and not exactly in the fashion you expect. For in­stance, by the year 2000 there is going to be such cultural and ethnic rearrangement as to challenge your notion of your own humanity.

That alone will reduce the prospects of originality and inventiveness as antidotes to boredom. But even in a more monochromatic world, the other trouble with originality and inventiveness is precisely that they literally pay off. Provided that you are capable ofeither, you will become well offrather fast. Desirable as that may be, most of you know firsthand that nobody is as bored as the rich, for money buys time, and time is repetitive. Assuming that you are not heading for poverty—for otherwise you wouldn't have entered college—one expects you to be hit by boredom as soon as the first tools of self-gratification become available to you.

Thanks to modern technology, those tools are as nu­merous as boredom's synonyms. In light of their function— to render you oblivious to the redundancy of time—their abundance is revealing. Equally revealing is the function of your purchasing power, toward whose increase you'll walk out of this commencement ground through the click and whirr of some of those instruments tightly held by your parents and relatives. It is a prophetic scene, ladies and gentlemen of the class of 1989, for you are entering the world where recording an event dwarfs the event itself—the world of video, stereo, remote control, jogging suit, and exercise machine to keep you fit for reliving your own or someone else's past: canned ecstasy claiming raw flesh.

Everything that displays a pattern is pregnant with boredom. That applies to money in more ways than one, both to the banknotes as such and to possessing them. That is not to bill poverty, of course, as an escape from bore­dom—although St. Francis, it would seem, has managed exactly that. Yet for all the deprivation surrounding us, the idea of new monastic orders doesn't appear particularly catchy in this era of video-Christianity. Besides, young and newfangled, you are more eager to do good in some South Africa or other than next door, keener on giving up your favorite brand of soda than on venturing to the wrong side of the tracks. So nobody advises poverty for you. All one can suggest is to be a bit more apprehensive of money, for the zeros in your accounts may usher in their mental equivalents.

As for poverty, boredom is the most brutal part ofits misery, and the departure from it takes more radical forms: of violent rebellion or drug addiction. Both are temporary, for the misery of poverty is infinite; both, because of that infinity, are costly. In general, a man shooting heroin into his vein does so largely for the same reason you buy a video: to dodge the redundancy of time. The difference, though, is that he spends more than he's got, and that his means of escape become as redundant as what he is escaping from faster than yours. On the whole, the difference in tactility between a syringe's needle and a stereo's push button roughly corre­sponds to that between the acuteness and dullness of time's impact upon the have-nots and the haves. In short, whether rich or poor, sooner or later you will be afflicted by this redundancy of time.

Potential haves, you'll be bored with your work, your friends, your spouses, your lovers, the view from your win­dow, the furniture or wallpaper in your room, your thoughts, yourselves. Accordingly, you'll try to devise ways of escape. Apart from the self-gratifying gadgets mentioned before, you may take up changing jobs, residence, company, country, climate; you may take up promiscuity, alcohol, travel, cook­ing lessons, drugs, psychoanalysis.

In fact, you may lump all these together; and for a while that may work. Until the day, of course, when you wake up in your bedroom amid a new family and a different wallpaper, in a different state and climate, with a heap of bills from your travel agent and your shrink, yet with the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring through your window. You'll put on your loafers only to discover they're lacking bootstraps to lift yourself out of what you recognize. De­pending on your temperament or the age you are at, you will either panic or resign yourself to the familiarity of the sensation; or else you'll go through the rigmarole of change once more.

Neurosis and depression will enter your lexicon; pills, your medical cabinet. Basically, there is nothing wrong about turning life into the constant quest for alternatives, into leap­frogging jobs, spouses, surroundings, etc., provided you can afford the alimony and jumbled memories. This predica­ment, after all, has been sufficiently glamorized on screen and in Romantic poetry. The rub, however, is that before long this quest turns into a full-time occupation, with your need for an alternative coming to match a drug addict's daily fix.

There is yet another way out of it, however. Not a better one, perhaps, from your point of view, and not necessarily secure, but straight and inexpensive. Those ofyou who have read Robert Frost's "Servant to Servants" may remember a line of his: "The best way out is always through." So what I am about to suggest is a variation on the theme.

When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.

The idea here, to paraphrase another great poet of the En­glish language, is to exact full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

In a manner of speaking, boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time's infinity, which is to say, on your insignif­icance in it. That's what accounts, perhaps, for one's dread of lonely, torpid evenings, for the fascination with which one watches sometimes a fleck of dust aswirl in a sunbeam, and somewhere a clock tick-tocks, the day is hot, and your will­power is at zero.

Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. For boredom speaks the lan­guage of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life—the one you didn't get here, on these green lawns—the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. "You are finite," time tells you in a voice of boredom, "and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile." As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their conse­quences and the attendant self-aggrandizement.

For boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result ofwhich is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and the more compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust aswirl in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much life went into those flecks! Not from your point of view but from theirs.

You are to them what time is to you; that's why they look so small. And do you know what the dust says when it's being wiped off the table?

"Remember me," whispers the dust.

Nothing could be farther away from the mental agenda of any of you, young and newfangled, than the sentiment expressed in this two-liner of the German poet Peter Huchel, now dead.

I've quoted it not because I'd like to instill in you affinity for things small—seeds and plants, grains of sand or mosquitoes—small but numerous. I've quoted these lines because I like them, because I recognize in them myself, and, for that matter, any living organism to be wiped off from the available surface. " 'Remember me,' whispers the dust." And one hears in this that if we learn about ourselves from time, perhaps time, in turn, may learn something from us. What would that be? That inferior in significance, we best it in sensitivity.

This is what it means—to be insignificant. If it takes 'yVill-paralyzing boredom to bring this home, then hail the boredom. You are insignificant because you are finite. Yet the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life, emotions, joy, fears, compassion. For infinity is not terribly lively, not terribly emotional. Your boredom, at least, tells you that much. Because your boredom is the boredom of infinity.

Respect it, then, for its origins—as much perhaps as for your own. Because it is the anticipation of that inanimate infinity that accounts for the intensity of human sentiments, often resulting in a conception of a new life. This is not to say that you have been conceived out of boredom, or that the finite breeds the finite (though both may ring true). It is to suggest, rather, that passion is the privilege of the insignificant.

So try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom. Another one, ofcourse, is pain—physical more so than psychological, passion's frequent aftermath; although I wish you neither. Still, when you hurt you know that at least you haven't been deceived (by your body or by your psyche). By the same token, what's good about boredom, about anguish and the sense of the meaninglessness of your own, of everything else's existence, is that it is not a deception.

You also might try detective novels or action movies— something that leaves you where you haven't been verbally/ visually/mentally before—something sustained, if only for a couple of hours. Avoid TV, especially flipping the channels: that's redundancy incarnate. Yet should those remedies fail, let it in, "fling your soul upon the growing gloom." Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and an­guish, which anyhow are larger than you. No doubt you'll find that bosom smothering, yet try to endure it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don't think you've goofed somewhere along the line, don't try to retrace your steps to correct the error. No, as the poet said, "Believe your pain." This awful bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won't finally unclasp.

If you find all this gloomy, you don't know what gloom is. If you find this irrelevant, I hope time will prove you right. Should you find this inappropriate for such a lofty occasion, I will disagree.

I would agree with you had this occasion been cele­brating your staying here; but it marks your departure. By tomorrow you'll be out of here, since your parents paid only for four years, not a day longer. So you must go elsewhere, to make your careers, money, families, to meet your unique fates. And as for that elsewhere, neither among stars and in the tropics nor across the border in Vermont is there much awareness of this ceremony on the Dartmouth Green. One wouldn't even bet that the sound ofyour band reaches White River Junction.