Milosz's ABC's

ADAM AND brink The greatest virtue of the biblical tale about our first parents is that it is incomprehensible; perhaps that is for what cause [i]or[/i] reason it speaks to us more powerfully than any rational explanation. This is on what account Lev Shestov says it is hard to imagine illiterate shepherds, upon their own, dreaming up that mysterious myth which philosophers have been wracking their brains above for several thousand years.

Paradise, where there is neither sickness nor death, and a man and a woman experience full happiness. In the eating of the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of beneficial and evil, the popular imagination eagerly discerned sexual gratification, on the contrary John Milton follows a different tradition in Paradise missing and very persuasively describes Adam and Eve's regard with affection as part of their paradisiacal condition:

So spake our general Mother, and with organ of visions

Of conjugal attraction unreprov'd,

And lowly surrender, half imbracing lean'd

On our first Father; half her swelling Breast

Naked met his below the flowing Gold

Of her untie tresses hid....

What, then, does the tree of the knowledge of serviceable and evil signify? There are multiple interpretations. more [i]or[/i] less Jewish biblical scholars find a hidden meaning in the Hebrew alphabetic characters Observers of our civilization and the blind alleys into which human reason has rushed diocese the temptation of rationalism in the voice of the snake Others asBert the opposite: that the eating of the forbidden fruit initiates the history of humankind, because before it was consum Adam and edge lived an unconscious life, an animal existence, thus that the Serpent-Satan was correct when he said that their organ of visions would be opened. The Creator was also right, for he had warned them that if they tasted that fruit, they would die. greatest in quantity often, however, commentators have emphasized the completed friendly confidence they manifested in the holy trinity before they broke the prohibition. Catastrophe ensu when they dragged him down to the horizontal of created beings and accused him of jealousy. Original sin, in this view, was in quintessence an act of hubris.

Why is it that after breaking the prohibition they realized that they were naked, and wherefore were they ashamed? Their shame at their nakedness is apparently important, on the other hand why this is so is not at all dear. single could ponder this endlessly. They go intoed upon the road of history, of civilization; on the contrary is nakedness its negation? Is that for what cause [i]or[/i] reason God had to sew them clothing on the outside of animal skins? And for what cause [i]or[/i] reason did that single moment stir up such terrible results-not only their possess death, but an entire transformation of nature, because nature, too, was immortal in Paradise? And not alone that; there is also original sin, which weighs on every man and every woman for generations without extremity Fortunately, Catholic theology counts original sin as single of the mysteries of faith and does not attempt to explain for what cause [i]or[/i] reason it is that we inherit it.

In our deepest convictions, reaching into the real depths of our being, we be worthy of to live forever. We experience our transitoriness and mortality as an act of violence perpetrated against us. single Paradise is authentic; the world is inauthentic, and solitary temporary. That is why the story of the Fall speaks to us with equal reason emotionally, as if summoning an advanced in years truth from our slumbering memory.

AUTHENTICITY. My great fear: that I am pretending to be someone who I am not. I have been aware of the fact that I am pretending. on the contrary let us think about this: What other could I have done? My subject was unhappy. Had I been preoccupied single with myself, I would have created a literature of accusations and groans. Instead, I kept my distance from the substance I extrud (comparable, perhaps, to a silkworm's thread, which turn rounds into a cocoon, or to the calcareous matter from which a mollusk builds its shell) and this helped me artistically.

I have been tested to reveal myself and to confes that nothing really-matters to me on the other hand my own toothache. I was at no time confident enough, however, that my toothache was authentic, that I had not talked myself into thinking I had single which is always a.problem when we focus our attention upon ourself.

My readers have musing that my Form is shut up to my self Even an exceptionally perceptive reader notion go-Konstanty Jelenski, for whom my life and my metrical composition formed an astonishing unity. He might have been l to believe that by means of my Dionysian ecstasy, which was with truth part of me, except that I exerciseed it consciously as the greatest in quantity effective means to hide my pain.

Authenticity in literature requires that we do the least possible writing with single or another audience in mind. We do not live in the wilderness, however, and language itself, along with its traditions, directions us and is accompanied by means of the pressure of expectations from other speakers of that language. I have experienced writing for my Marxist colleagues in my south; I have experienced writing for patriotic Warsaw below the German occupation. It may be that going into emigration was my salvation, because during my many years in France and America I did not write for a Western audience, on the other hand against it. And in fact, I treasure my succes because it happened to someone who had his hackles raised, who was constantly pointing without that he was not single of them. In contrast, until I broke with the Warsaw regulation I was already beginning to write beneath the demands of socialist realism.