Moon June Spoon Tuesday, August 24, 2004

I've been quiet lately, sorry. Busy busy busy at home. A cocktail this time: Some politics, some aesthetics, some Jesus freaking. But I'll let someone else do the heavy lifting. This from a valedictory essay to Czeslaw Milosz, whom I never read but probably should. The opening paragraphs:

Poland passed through the middle of the 20th century as few other nations (and most of those its immediate neighbours), experiencing the full onslaught of Nazism from one side, then Communism from the other. Old, gallant, Catholic Poland, whose officers met the Wehrmacht on horseback, and who were buried in mass graves at Katyn, remains an anomaly to this day: the last national bastion of public Catholicism in Europe. The presence of Polish troops in Iraq, commanding the multinational contingent, reminds us that there is one country that remains unabashed in support of America and the West. Within the European Union, the Poles have become leaders of the "New Europe", whose desire is for a genuinely free community of nations, rather than to be ruled by an axis of France and Germany.

It is perhaps a holding action, and Poland, too, will crumble; or perhaps Poland offers a bulwark for the recovery of Christendom and the West. There is a deeper history in this than is first apparent, and through four divisions of its territories, over centuries, Poland has survived as itself.


And a killer quote from the middle of the piece:

Replying to Karl Marx's old saw that religion is the "opium of the people", Milosz once said: "A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death -- the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged."

@ 9:31:00 AM, ,