Day 33: Wislawa Szymborska, Isaac Babel, Jean Paul Sartre
I have finished the university semester and now can continue writing and reading more regularly for this blog.
Poem: Wislawa Szymborska - Conversation with a Stone
I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.
I want to enter your insides,\ have a look round,\ breathe my fill of you.”
“Go away,” says the stone.\ “I’m shut tight.\ Even if you break me to pieces,\ we’ll all still be closed.\ You can grind us to sand,\ we still won’t let you in.”
Read the rest here
A wacky longish poem from the Polish poet, all about human vs object logic. The OOO people would enjoy this poem.
Other than having a playful Dr. Seus quality, the poem reminded me of a few cool ideas:
- For about 6 months last year I was obsessed with the phrase "trapped in the stone" and was seeking to write a short story about a boy who spent his whole life believing he was trapped in a stone after seeing his reflection in a polished amethyst. the boy then spent the next 60 years of his life believing it was all an ersatz, one could not believe in or commit to. I still need to finish this story.
- I also had another Stone idea. what if you convinced a small child that all rocks were actually hollow? how would the child ever be able to disprove this fact, when one can only ever see a rocks exterior? even if the child cut it in half, the hollow stone would only get turned into two hollow stones. I will fly this idea past my nephew tomorrow.
Story: Isaac Babel - My First Goose
A classic very short story, hailed as a masterpiece of the form. You can read it here.
Babel does a lot with very little words and though the story feels fairly freeflowing and "random" in its chain of events, each sentence is vital to the story.
The story gives a very simple encapsulation of men in war and the nature of atrocities.
Spoilers but I will quote the most important scene here:
And, turning around, I saw someone’s saber lying nearby. A haughty goose was waddling through the yard, placidly grooming its feathers. I caught the goose and forced it to the ground, its head cracking beneath my boot, cracking and bleeding. Its white neck lay stretched out in the dung, and the wings folded down over the slaughtered bird.
“Goddammit!” I said, poking at the goose with the saber. “Roast it for me, mistress!”
The old woman, her blindness and her spectacles flashing, picked up the bird, wrapped it in her apron, and hauled it to the kitchen.
“Comrade,” she said after a short silence. “This makes me want to hang myself.” And she pulled the door shut behind her. In the yard the Cossacks were already sitting around their pot. They sat motionless, straight-backed like heathen priests, not once having looked at the goose.
“This fellow’ll fit in here well enough,” one of them said, winked, and scooped up some cabbage soup with his spoon.
The brief killing of the woman's goose is so shocking and violent, as harmful as anything else he could have done, and the Cossacks understand this. He has proven himself.
The ending is quite beautiful in its misplaced sentimentality that is then punctured.
[...] we went to sleep in the hayloft. Six of us slept there warming each other, our legs tangled, under the holes in the roof which let in the stars.
I dreamed and saw women in my dreams, and only my heart, crimson with murder, screeched and bled.
Jean Paul Sartre - The End of the War
Sartre's remarks about the end of WWII and the existentialist predicament knowing that the world can now end with an atom bomb at any time.
There are a lot of ideas I am too tired/unversed to write about yet. this is the first essay I've read in the new Penguin Book of existentialist Philosophy that I bought today.
The first paragraph that I really wanted to highlight was this:
People look at each other with a vague sense of dis- appointment: is this all that Peace is?
It isn't Peace. Peace is a beginning. We are living through death throes. For a long time we thought War and Peace were two clearly distinct entities, like Black and White or Hot and Cold. It wasn't true and today we know it. Between 1934 and 1939, we learned that Peace can end without war breaking out. We are familiar with the exquisite subtleties of armed neutrality, intervention, and pre-belligerency. The movement from peace to war in our century is a matter of continuous gradations. On the most optimistic view, we are going to have to go through this in the opposite direction. Today, 20 August 1945, in this deserted, starving Paris, the War has ended but Peace has not begun.
Towards the end of the essay, Sartre infers that man's invention of the atomic bomb (alongside all the other unfathomable cruelties of the recent war) have proven Nietzsches claim that "God is dead and we have killed him", that nation and community also mean nothing, and that each man is left to be their own judge of right and wrong. Bleak to the point of cliche.
I guess I agree, but I'd never bother to say these words aloud or to write them down, as Sarte and Camus and Neitzsche all the others have said it a thousand times.
Still, "existentialism 101" aside, I find Sartres afformentioned comments on the gradations of peace and war particuarly illuminating.
Last, I will say that this essay has incredible rhetorical flourish. I expected Sartre to be dry as hell, but I felt like I was reading a great speech.
Gonna keep reading this book of essays, and come back to the Esme Waijan Wan again, as I'm 60% through.