| You think you’re going to experience something, and you may even actually experience it, but then suddenly you realize that you didn’t experience anything, and it doesn’t bother you at all. It doesn’t bother you that you can’t remember anything about what you didn’t experience and what you experienced. It doesn’t (...)
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| | Down Garwolińska to the end, then hang a right onto Makowska along the railroad tracks toward Olszynka. Sometimes all the way to the roundhouse. The street looked like a village road; on hot days it would be lined with guys sitting and drinking. Branches of fruit trees reached over the fences. (...)
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Jerzy StempowskiEssays
There is a particularly Polish cultural phenomenon that has remained out of the spotlight until now, but which deserves attention: the literary essay. By this we generally mean short texts in which ethical, political, and artistic reflections are expressed in a form mindful of their literary, poetic character. These texts are written as monologues, by far the majority of them in the first person, in which a mind's expressions are melded with a suggestive prose that draws the reader in and ensures that the arguments it embodies are more fanciful and dialectical than in a traditional essay.
Jerzy Stempowski was the most representative of Polish essayists, and at the same time the most European. He was erudite (he knew four languages fluently), and typified a classically-educated intelligentsia that today no longer exists. With his cosmopolitan vision of the world, and his characteristic nonchalance, Stempowski demonstrated equal command of both the world of Athens and that of Moscow. He studied philosophy in Krakow, Munich, Zürich, and Bern. Beginning with the war, he lived in Switzerland; and from this apparently remote point of observation, he wrote his essays, which were published, in Polish, in Paris.
An anthology of Stempowski's essayistic output should with no doubt contain his "Essay for Cassandra" (1950), the title piece in his famous book on Western Civilization's failure to anticipate historical catastrophes. The book's ongoing topicality was confirmed recently in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. As Stempowski himself said years ago: "It's clear that discipline and passion are no longer enough. If Europe, which has been devastated by so many insanities, wants to avoid being destroyed altogether, its inhabitants will have to learn to more accurately foresee the consequences of their actions, and they must no longer disregard those who already can. The older generation is almost entirely indifferent to this problem. I'm thinking now about the youth, who have their whole lives before them. Who of them will put on the cloak of which Cassandra says to Apollo: 'In this prophet's cloak, you will be the laughing-stock of your enemies.'"
An Essay for Cassandra
The ancient world has bequeathed to us two conceptions of divination and prophecy. The first is based on a belief in supernatural powers of various degrees and types, having access to future events and prepared, for a modest payment, to provide interested parties with useful pointers. The second is rational, based on the measurability of the processes of nature and on our supposed ability to forecast the results that may result from acts or situations. In antiquity, the first sort of divination was widely utilized by initiates of varying degrees, who operated in temples or other places favorable to relations with the supernatural powers. This sort of divination has never died out and continues to earn a living for numerous fortunetellers, cabalists, mind readers, and astrologers. There are even coin-operated fortune-telling machines. I saw one years ago at the Eiffel Tower. My companion tossed a copper coin into it. The coin-operated machine ejected a rose-colored card bearing the inscription: Tu seras toujours follement aimee.
Resort to such forms of divination has been made, both in the past and at the present, principally in private matters, and more seldom in those of a more public or general nature. The thing is that our abilities at forecasting seem to be most unreliable in personal matters. The calculability of future accidents diminishes in proportion to any rise in the possibility for an observer to interfere in them. An eclipse of the moon can be predicted with the greatest of accuracy. In this case, the possibility of interference by an observer is zero. The overall number of future automobile accidents, taking into account the known degree to which gasoline and alcohol are consumed, can be predicted quite accurately, although less precisely than a lunar eclipse, The person making the calculations, however, is incapable of predicting when he himself will be run over by a car. If he were able to foresee the day, he would spend the whole day lying in bed, and his calculations would turn out to be incorrect. It is possible in the case of some diseases to predict with some degree of probability the amount of life remaining to the patient, but this can be done only with incurable diseases resistant to the efforts of the physician. Aside form the dates when letters of credit fall due, personal life contains so few predictable elements that those desirous of knowing the future in such cases have been justified in turning throughout the ages to the services of fortune tellers and women skilled in the cabbala.
As a subject for prediction, political affairs occupy an intermediate ground and are susceptible of approximate forecasting. In republics, the most salient permanent and measurable factor is the inertia and lack of initiative on the part of the voting public. In republics, it can be predicted on any given occasion with a high degree of probability that neither the voting public nor the legislature will make any unexpected choices, and that in consequence no unusual incidents will occur and everything will remain as it always has been. This permanence and fixity of the balance of forces is the source of the wealth and high culture of the republics. Having taken note of the main reason for this continuity, it is also possible to predict that the republics will show little resilience in the face of outside events.
The actions of the dictators are apparently less predictable, since they depend to a greater degree on the personal initiative of a single man. This, however, is usually an illusion. The dictator is a prisoner of the mechanism of absolute power, which works with great precision. In this system, the personal tastes and notions of the dictator play the smallest of roles.
The position of prophet in a republic is full of internal contradictions. The capacity for accurate forecasting is all the larger, to the degree that a more prominent role is played at a particular moment by mechanical factors independent of the initiative of the observer, and therefore more easily calculated. In other words, the less the citizenry is able to recognize on its own its situation and the results of its actions - and therefore the less it interferes in the course of events - the easier it is to forecast the future. The accuracy of the forecasting is thus inversely proportional to the attention that the citizenry pays to it.
Enmeshed in this contradiction, the prophet stands helpless, and often despairing, before his people. The more sure he is of the future course of events, the greater his isolation.
Under the government of the dictators, the consciousness of future catastrophes is quite widespread and the prophet generally has nothing new to say to his audience. It is a matter of indifference whether or not he manages to convince them of anything, since the opinion of the majority means nothing. Even the most accurate forecast of the way that a given situation will evolve is devoid of utility here, because it is already too late to alter the further course of events.
Translated by William Brand
Jerzy STEMPOWSKI, pseud. Pawel Hostowiec (1894 - 1969) - essayist, literary critic. Father of the contemporary Polish literary essay.
Polish edition by Institut Littéraire and Spoleczny Instytut Wydawniczy ZNAK
German edition by ROSPO Verlag: Hamburg 1998; transl. by Agnieszka Grzybowska and Nina Kozlowski
Jerzy Stempowski Eseje
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