Another Beauty

"What would the great, innocent artists of the past, Giotto or van Eyk, Proust or Apollinaire, have done if some spiteful demon had set them down in our flawed and tawdry world, warped by so-called Totalitarianism?... And what if they had been transported to a wealthy nation, free, but indifferent--what would they have said?" Coming of age in communist Poland in the 1960s and '70s, and living now in Paris and Houston, Adam Zagajewski writes of his experiences on both sides of this political and economic divide. More deeply, however, his prose memoir probes and explores the questions that art must always face: How do we stay spiritually alive in an oppressive culture? How do we keep burning?

"Reality expanded in the hands of the past's great artists," he writes. "It became enticing and mysterious, plumed like the wings of a hawk." So too with Zagajewski, both in his poetry (see especially Mysticism for Beginners and Canvas) and in many of the entries here. At times a simple paragraph in length, at other times ranging across a few pages, each section is both self-contained and a part of the whole. While apparently random--Another Beauty has no chapters, and no clear chronology--the brief passages each function as one facet on the diamond of the whole.

This poet refuses easy irony. "Our task is far too serious for us to mind the fickle temper of the times," he writes. "We, things, are reality's roots, we are the pillars of being. We've got no use for young literary critics with their irony." Irony can be cheap, whether in Poland in the 1960s or in America in the new millennium. Zagajewski doesn't waste his time, or ours, with it. Instead he tends to reality. He knows he can't answer the big questions, but he also knows that those are the ones that matter. --Doug Thorpe