Time of Trial
SULLIVAN, DANIEL
Time of Trial Czeslaw Milosz's chronicle of chaos. BY DANIEL SULLIVAN "I have often thought," Czes-law Milosz wrote to Jerzy Andrzejewski in 1942, "of writing a new 'confessions of a child of the...
...In some ways, Legends of Modernity is Milosz's attempt to rearm himself intellectually, to discern after the initial descent into madness what led man to his dementia...
...the idea of democracy had perished...
...From hiding, he watched the self-immolation of European civilization...
...BY DANIEL SULLIVAN "I have often thought," Czes-law Milosz wrote to Jerzy Andrzejewski in 1942, "of writing a new 'confessions of a child of the age,' such as Musset wrote . . . that would exceed, in its violence and scream of pain, that Romantic era's settling of accounts of conscience...
...Charles Darwin seemed to vindicate Thomas Hobbes: Civilization no longer corrupted nature, but merely clothed it...
...Two central concepts figure prominently throughout all of the legends: man as a natural animal, and the subjugation of truth to action...
...Looking to nature, man saw not the benign innate goodness that Rousseau saw, but something amoral and violent...
...Once truth has no claim on man, Milosz insisted, man makes his own truth in accord with his basest impulses...
...In the essay with the most personal resonance, "The Experience of War," Milosz cites Tolstoy's phrase describing Pierre Bezukhov's mental state during the French seizure of Moscow in War and Peace: "excitement bordering on madness...
...Clearly recalling his own experience in 1939, when he fled Poland for Vilnius and then Romania, he calls this mental state "a condition of intellectual disarmament, born from a feeling of intellectual defense-lessness in relation to an inner compulsion (to go, to act, to fulfill commands, to be in a crowd, etc...
...the book can be obscure (especially when discussing inter-war Polish authors), convoluted, and confused...
...Seeing in the natural world an amoral struggle, man identified the good with his own will, his own life energy...
...In addressing them, Legends of Modernity gives us a startling memoir of the intellectual decay and chaos preceding and accompanying Europe's disastrous plunge into war...
...This became the nature that man mistook for the essence of human affairs...
...These were no match for Hitler or Stalin...
...but the reader of Milosz finds himself wondering, "How well...
...It is worth asking whether we have found any ideas more promising...
...Pereat Veritas, fiat vita" ("let truth die, let life be"), cried Friedrich Nietzsche, coining the motto of the new world...
...If the essays and letters collected in this volume are those confessions, they reveal modern man's conscience to be nearly unaccountable...
...Thus, he valued his own "natural" sense of goodness and truth over the traditions, history, and experience of civilization...
...What happened...
...According to Milosz, this set the stage for the second major development, the subjection of truth to action—and, ultimately, to power...
...Catholicism had been transformed into a desiccated mummy, . . . philosophy was drowning in conventionalism and fictional-ism, while Marxism 'of the general line' jeered mercilessly at the 'rotting' of Western Europe...
...Milosz admits as much...
...Of course, this is only the briefest outline, and the reader will discover much more in Milosz's account...
...Milosz does high cultural history here, emphasizing ideas and animating concepts instead of material conditions...
...The first ultimately leads to the second, and both brought the West to 1939...
...The interwar years had offered only complacent, hollow humanitarianism and unconsidered, self-satisfied moralisms...
...In 1942, Czeslaw Milosz wondered what intellectual soil remained for conscience after the poisonous intellectual seeds modernity had sown...
...In the crowded cities of this world, isolated individuals unknown to each other competed in obscurity...
...During the years (1942-43) that Milosz worked on these essays, he lived clandestinely in Warsaw and participated in the "cultural arm of the Polish anti-Nazi resistance...
...The 19th century brought this development to its apotheosis, for nature revealed itself in man's eyes as an endless struggle for supremacy among species, a "nasty, brutish and short" battle of isolated beasts...
...At times he partakes of the vices of lesser thinkers...
...Americans who were in downtown Manhattan on September 11, 2001, might be able to sympathize...
...has addressed the same problems— how well we have since accounted for the conscience of modern man...
...His intellectual reaction, recorded most vividly in the letters he exchanged with Andrzejewski, gives this book a compelling and tragic sensibility: He looked around at "the ruins of Europe, tangible ruins more in the spiritual than the physical sense," and wondered what good it would do to point out the evil that has "revealed itself in all its grandeur...
...But one hopes it indicates the degree to which Milosz's legends of modernity have persisted into our own time, for many are familiar...
...But at their best, which is often, the essays evince a deep moral sense and a straightforward search for truth and the good, which is refreshing...
...Appearing for the first time in EngHsh, Milosz's wartime reflections startle the reader both by their desperate emotional intensity and their remarkable clear-headedness...
...Demagogues turned this into a naked logic of power and preached whatever "truth" moved the people to action, whatever propaganda made them feel good and attracted them to the dictator...
...The book is unabashedly intellectual in the continental tradition of Johan Huizinga or Jose Ortega y Gasset...
...But perhaps more unsettling, it also provides a measure of how well the half-century after that cataclysm Daniel Sullivan is a writer in New Jersey...
...This is a book about modernity's failure to recognize and condemn evil when it stares us in the face...
...He soon recognized World War II as the logical endpoint, the pit into which modern man fell once he followed his ideas over the precipice of the 20th century...
...He described the time leading up to the war as one of "feverish and vain trying on of all the old costumes with which we tried to cover our pitiful nakedness...
...Milosz asked these questions in the darkness of World War II Warsaw...
...The pivotal first step, for Milosz, came when man began, after the Renaissance, to understand himself as a creature innately good in nature but whom civilization corrupted...
...But the damage was done: Once man saw his true goodness in his own nature, nature and not civilization became the criterion of morality...
...If we only have moral intuitions, independent of civilization, then we are back where Milosz started...
...That sense and that search are the criteria by which Milosz issues modernity its condemnation...
...In the years since the mid-century's suicidal spasm of violence, of course, the West has recovered...
...Socialism had turned wormy and fallen apart...
...The first eight essays in Legends of Modernity dissect this development...
...Truth became just another myth, and so man equated what was true with what conduced best to action, with what widened his own realm of experience, without wondering what actions are right or experiences worth avoiding...
...Milosz then makes the point that the supposedly innate goodness that man found in himself suspiciously resembled (and of course really aped) the morality that civilization had taught him...
...How did we come to this...
...And what shall we do now...
...It was the development of modernity's ideas and concepts themselves—the "legends" of the title—that prepared the catastrophe...
...How, intellectually, do we recognize the evils of our time...
Vol. 11 • June 2006 • No. 39
