ON THE AGONY OF THE WEST

...That duality should induce some reflection, for it shakes somewhat the fixed European opinion about the interaction of the spirit and body of a given human community...

...My childhood coincided with the First World War, thus with the end of an order that had been splendid in the opinion of some, rotten in the opinion of others, but an order...

...As for the Second World War, it fulfilled, with plenty to spare, the predictions of the prophets of decline, no matter what their assumptions...

...there was something automatic in it, and the popularity of science fiction exemplified by the optimistic novels of Jules Verne spoke more to the popular imagination than did angry treatises...

...he chose that state only as a model for consciously cultivated Virtue—the Virtue in whose name so many heads were soon to roll from the guillotine...

...Other romantics, called utopian socialists, discovered the panacea for all evil in primitive collective ownership when there had been no concept of private property, and this they tried to revive in their phalansteries...

...The young Marx came to the con clusion that man not only does not live as he should, but that the conditions in which he finds himself have alienated him from his essence, from his humanity...

...Perhaps the inauguration date of Europe's decadentism was 1886, the year the magazine Le Dˆcadent appeared in Paris...

...And I would say that the 19th century's despondencies, disenchantments, gloomy prophecies, previously pushed aside by the very weight of reality, grew more distinct and crystallized, attacking my maturing mind from all sides...

...How Western Europe functioned from the day the war ended until today when I write this is a perfect mystery to me, in spite of the fact that I lived there, in France, for ten years, from 1950 to 1960...

...However, it turned out just the other way around and CZESLAW MILOSZ what was apparently a poisoning became the agent of affluent stabilization...

...The Russian Revolution soon followed, initiating an era of comparisons: "there-here...

...Before Rousseau it hadn't entered anyone's mind to take the legend of the Golden Age literally and to dream about a state of nature without arts or sciences...

...Besides faith in universal evolution, this includes an unfavorable appraisal of the direction a country, a society, a civilization is taking...

...Never before in such a short span of time had so many millions of human beings been put to death, never before had the coldly planned destruction of whole peoples had such perfected technical means at its command...

...It is somewhat strange to write this while living in the country that has achieved the greatest economic power in history...

...I say myth because most obviously there is at work here a certain unity of aura and tone, stronger than truth or untruth...

...Only when science fiction begins to be laced with anxious forebodings and lends them antiutopian features can one speak of the surfacing of latent currents of despair...

...According to Hobbes man had emerged from primordial savagery, barbarism, the uncontrolled struggle of everyone against everyone...

...A new, enormous field was opened up for dilettantes and idlers, since anyone who had finished high school felt in his heart that he was an artist or at least qualified to hold forth on art...

...But while the spirit was spending itself on flight, the body—by the grace of America which for a long time had to keep the European economy in an "iron lung" and revive it artificially—was eating, drinking, buying automobiles and refrigerators...

...This means that 16yearolds get acquainted with Beckett and Ionesco in their school theater and soon encounter Nietzsche and Marx, Spengler and Sartre, Camus, and all sorts of antiutopias as well in inexpensive editions...

...No, from poetry and philosophy the mood of impotence linked with sullen buffoonery penetrated to the masses through the novel, the theater, film, and the press...

...The first great patron of the dissatisfied was, of course, Rousseau who opposed the views of Hobbes, which were shared by the sober disciples of reason...

...Film entered into competition with the novel, the language of images lending a sometimes fantastic power to the sense of disgust, and in Fellini and Antonioni, for example, film took themes from philosophers, primarily their angry attacks on (evil) existence cut off from (good) human essence...

...Marx located that set of conditions in the past, in primitive communism, and in the future, in industrial communism...

...At the same time the whole world was hearing about "the decay of capitalism" and its inevitable, fatal agony...

...Obviously, the West had already entered the ebb phase of its life forces...

...hence the further conclusion (not altogether a logical one—rather, an act of faith) that somewhere there must be a set of conditions assuring the unity of essence and existence...

...and since I knew French, I learned about the invasion of pessimism from the books of fanatics of Cartesian clarity, mainly conservatives who, like Henri Massis (Defense de l'Occident) saw the Germans as the breeding ground of the epidemic...

...It is enough here to cite the modem city appearing in Baudelaire as cite infernale...

...However, the progress of technology in the course of the 19th century cared little for the plans of visionaries and revolutionaries...

...For, after all, that is what is served by the extraordinary growth of higher education and the production of paperback books, so furious that, as a New York publisher once said to me, they're shoveled into storerooms like coal...

...Someone from another planet wishing to evaluate Western Europe on the basis of what it thought of itself would have to admit that a revolution was approaching there and that at least in renewed mutual slaughter the inhabitants of that part of the earth would find a certain relief...

...But Tolstoy and Rousseau are just two of many answers...

...E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot— programmatically reverted to the past, seeing in the present only sterility, boredom, a wasteland of "hollow men" deprived of religious faith and thus of purpose and meaning in existence...

...Thereafter, more and more people would contribute to the confusion, opposing to a world without gods and a civilization without promise their own cult and arguing fiercely about which of the quickly changing artistic "isms" made the most suitable substitute for the liturgy...

...Perhaps Berdyaev is right in calling Tolstoy the evil genius of Russia, for the sage of Yasnaya Polyana trained the Russian intelligentsia in the advancing of absolute demands, in what may be called impatience with institutions, hierarchies, gradual improvement, in general with history as the fabric of the intricate interdependence of the better and the worse...

...In other words, whatever may be the thoughts of those innumerable advocates of American purity for whom Europe has always been a source only of evil, the myth of decline and decay has to be contagious...

...hope was sought in Oriental sages, Hinduism, Bhuddism...

...Toward the end of his long life, H. G. Wells, till then always faithful to his scientifichumanitarian visions, published a small, despairing book, Mind at the End of Its Tether, in which he confessed that he saw little chance for a humanity entangled in its own inventions to survive...

...Tolstoy, Rousseau's disciple, in many respects outdid his master in the finality of his judgments...

...It was revived by various kinds of disintegrating substances, chiefly by the crisis in religion...

...A conviction of the decadence, the rotting of the West, seems to be a permanent part of the equipment of enlightened and sensitive people for dealing with the horrors accompanying technological progress...

...All the same, the very intoxication with forward movement and space corresponded to the mood of the pioneers and settlers who found reward for their labors in material success...

...Although I feel a certain kinship with them, it is precisely that which disposes me toward being a bit mistrustful of myself—for their activities are a mirror in which I can easily see myself...

...This doesn't mean that I was reading Spengler or that I knew anything about England...

...However, as soon as we assume that a regression is actually occuring, the question arises—a regression from what, where is that ideal state of equilibrium and vigor for which we are supposed to yearn...

...Still, in America, almost from the beginning, almost at the foundations, there can be found the dream of Arcadia, of a harmonious life in concord with Nature, of the self-sufficiency of the individual who is happy and honest only when he takes just as much as he needs from Nature with the aid of his axe and rifle, shunning an ever corrupt society and state...

...And I, raised on tart and bitter European dishes, am now surrounded by new Thoreaus who differ from their spiritual forebear in that they consider the "quiet desperation" of their millions of fellow citizens to be the result of an increasingly cybernetic civilization and who, while spitefully awaiting the direction it has taken to be proven wrong, quote Nietzsche or Marx, or again something lifted from biology on the birth and withering away of organisms...

...The Romantics were taken by the Middle Ages and from their time on we have lived with the idealized image of an organic, patriarchal civilization held together by the religious fervor of everyone from kings to commoners...

...Admittedly, Rousseau did not recommend a return to the condition of the innocent savage...

...American by background, T. S. Eliot, now read in the schools, was an exponent of the dark, plaintive tone on both sides of a diminished ocean and was no exception...

...This was an orgy, a pandemonium of all the disgust, bitterness, and hangovers I had known from my early youth and which, it would seem, only now have become fully acknowledged, revindicated, and justified with the help of fashionable discourses on la nausee, the absurd, alienation...

...For me there is no doubt that my mind imbibed all the possible ingredients of despair from the European civilization in which I grew up...

...Thoreau, according to whom the civilized inhabitants of New England bore their lot as men with "quiet desperation," established something of an archetype for American intellectuals, propagating civil disobedience and fleeing to his log cabin on a forest lake...

...From defeated Germany there radiated harsh and scornful tidings of the impasse into which Western man had been thrust by overweening Reason...

...Besides, it would be difficult to separate the European contribution from the American...

...There" most frequently meant Russia, occasionally some other 24 country where Communists were in power, "sometime" meant the voyage of mankind to the Islands of Happiness after the abolition of the private means of production and the fusing of essence and existence into one...

...Whitman also glorified this Adam...

...no longer by what is communicated but by its ON THE AGONY OF THE WEST very form, art was to be a religion and the artist its priest...

...Translated from Polish by RICHARD LOURIE ON THE AGONY OF THE WEST...

...at the same time, this conviction is as old as modem art...

...It is not difficult to establish how motifs and forms migrated from elite genres, from abstruse treatises or hermetic poetry which made little sense to the general public, to the media of mass communication...

...If only it had been a small group of the chosen, well versed in that pastime best defined by the French word ricaner, "to laugh venomously...

...it was axiomatic that the West was dying...

...but, judging by the grimace of rage and contempt emanating from the works of pen, brush, and camera, never before have so many people taken up indictment as a pastime...

...Still, tendencies of that sort were not alien even to Poland where they made their way through the writings of prerevolutionary Russians...

...The novel diluted and rendered accessible experiments that had at first only been appreciated by the initiated...

...America is separated from Europe by the Atlantic, though not so very much...

...America's technical know-how in recent decades has been devoted to, among other things, aiding the assimilation of European ideas...

...The authors grouped around this magazine declared that they wished not to create but to destroy, for the hyper-bIasee civilization of the West was dying and could no longer be saved...

...This spirit rejected any "here and now," praising to the skies some "there and sometime...

...A cheerful young giant, a child in the cradle strangling Centaurs, with an ever more splendid future before it: that nortrait of America is ultimately mythical too, and we will probably commit no great error in supposing a country like that created by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass never existed, that it was derived from his imagination, just as was the city-wilderness with an inaccessible center—Balzac's Paris...

...This question has met with the most diverse answers...

...The theater of the absurd brought to the stage that which had been for some time well-known to readers of poetry...

...The old romantic yearning for hieratic, priestly-chivalrous societies was reborn in the theses of Oswald Spengler (who had a predecessor in the Russian Nikolai Danilevsky), which saw civilizations as organisms experiencing in turn childhood, maturity, and the senility of old age...

...Hitler's counterrevolution seemed to corroborate completely such slogans...

...England's young writers—T...

...More or less at the same time the deification of art as the loftiest, sacral activity began to filter from small groups of bohemians to wider circles...

...Insofar as the European spirit hated itself, turned against itself, derided the institutions it had elaborated, it was perhaps masking a painful sense of its own disgrace...

...His Mind at the End of Its Tether is nothing else than Allen Ginsberg's "Moloch whose name is the Mind...

...But the flower of decadentism had only begun to bud...