Customer Reviews

To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays

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Czeslaw Milosz is a renowned writer of both poetry and prose. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. In his long life, he has seen and written about many of the events of the Twentieth Century, including the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, the Warsaw Uprising, and the rise and fall of communism. He served as a diplomat from Poland to the United States following WWII. Among his books is an incisive critique of communism titled "The Captive Mind".

"To begin where I am" is a selection of Milosz's essays published between 1942 and 1998, some written initially in English, but most written in Polish. The essays are wide-ranging in theme and capture a great deal of the scope of Milosz's passions. The good introduction to the book by Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline Levine point out that Milosz "has centered his writings on a few fundamental philosophical questions: the meaning of history; the existence of evil and suffering; the transience of all life; theascendance of a scientific worldview andthe decline of the religious imagination." The essays are well-arranged into four main sections.

The first group of essays titled "These Guests of Mine" is primarily historical and descriptive in character. I enjoyed particularly Milosz's description of Wilno(Vilna) in his "Dictionary of Wilno Streets."

For me the heart of the book is in the second and third parts, titled "On the Side of Man" and "Against Incomprehensible Poetry." We learn a great deal about a writer by his discussions of those who have influenced him. In this book,Miloscz's essays on the American poet Robinson Jeffers, on the Russian philospher Lev Shestov, and on the French theological thinker Simone Weil are highly thoughtful. They reveal a writer both struggling for a commitment to religion, to Catholicism in particular, in the face of a scientific and material worldview which he finds inconsistent with it, and a writer committed to humanism, to the best in man and culture. They are an inspiring and difficult set of commitments, and Milosz discusses them eloquently.

In Part 3 of the book, the centerpiece is the title essay "Against Incomprehensible Poetry". In this essay, Milosz develops insights from W.H. Auden and makes them his own. Auden had said "there is only one thing that all poetry must do,it must praise all it can for being and for happening." (p.381). This insight becomes the basis of a critique of much obscurantism in modern poetry. We are privileged to hear, in the book, a discussion of the continuing value of poetry and informed discussion of many poets worth knowing, from Whitman, Blake,and Jeffers to many of Milosz's Polish contempories. These latter writers are unknown to me, but Milosz makes one wish for them as companions through his discussions.

The fourth part of the book. "In Constant Amazement", is brief and consists of a collection of aphorisms. The aphorism I found most striking discusses the nature of human sexuality. It begins: "Men and women carry within their imagination an image of themselves and of others as sexual beings and often that is the only thing that humanizes them." (p. 436)

This book helped me with my own thinking and reflection. I hope it will help you with yours as well.

I highly recommend this volume to anyone. Along with his recently published New and Collected Poems(Ecco Press), Milosz stands tall as one of the most accomplished writers in the modern era. This volume of essays is highly personal and eloquent. His prose style is immediate and vivid, capturing insights of history and the "poetic." His work on Jeffers is remarkable. This is a poet of our time--his thought triumphs over despair and the ills of the human condition. He has witnessed some of the most deliberate atrocities in world history--his essays evoke a wisdom based on personal remembrance-and there is no better vision of our predicament than what is offered here.

I was introduced to the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz in the context of a college-level seminar on European Intellectual History. We were not required to read a great deal of his poetry (10 poems, I think), but I remember the thrilling sense of discovery I experienced when I sunk my teeth into his lovely verses. Many say that he is the greatest of all Polish poets; I do not know if that is true, but he is certainly one of my favorites--a high compliment, I think, if you consider the fact that my knowledge of his stupendous oeuvre is based on English translations.

The book under review is a collection of Milosz' prose pieces in English. Some were written in English, most were translated from the original Polish, and all are fantastic. The first section of the book ("These Guests of Mine") introduces the poet through a series of autobiographical and biographical sketches, all of which shed light on the historical events and people that shaped his life and the themes he would so thoroughly explore through verse. It is in this section, my favorite section, that you'll find such gems as "Dictionary of Wilno Streets," "Journey to the West," and "Miss Anna and Miss Dora." Writing about Anna and Dora (a retired teacher and her retarded sister), Milosz writes: "I have never stopped seeing those two old women, defenseless against historical time, and simply time itself. No one but me remembers their names anymore." Want another? How about this (from "Pity"): "In the ninth decade of my life, the feeling which rises in me is pity, useless. A multitude, an immense number of faces, shapes, fates of particular beings, and a sort of merging with them from inside, but at the same time my awareness that I will not find anymore the means to offer a home in my poems to these guests of mine, for it is too late."

The second section of this book, entitled "On the Side of Man," explores Milosz' attempts to remain a man of religion (in his case, Catholicism) when faced with the cold, irrefutable facts of scientific investigation. Particularly interesting (at least for this reader) are his gloss on Dostoyevsky and his eloquent "An Essay in Which the Author Confesses that he is on the Side of Man, for Lack of Anything Better."

In part three, Milosz makes a poignant case against the trend of obscure poetry. I was not familiar with many of the poets he discusses in this section, but his interpretation of others--Frost, Eliot, and other giants of the stanza--changed the way in which I read and appreciate their inimitable verses. Should you not have the time to read all nine pieces in this section, at least read "Against Incomprehensible Poetry" and "Ruins and Poetry"; in these, I think, you will find the crux of his convincing argument against obscurantism.

The book ends with a series of excerpts from the "Notebook," all of which elaborate on his favorite themes: suffering, history, the scientific worldview, etc. You will find much to delight you here, and I'll sum up this review with one pithy aphorism: "For years I used to think about the indecency of all types of artistry, which, in every country I am familiar with, now or in the past, would have been impossible if the fate of the downtrodden and the humiliated were really felt intensely by others."

this book had some insightful essays by Milosz, like his poetry, his essays were engaging, interesting, an off-angle point of view