‘All Of Them Passionate And Deceived’

Czeslaw Milosz, from The Captive Mind, from his 1951 book about intellectuals under communist

Modern art reflects the disequilibrium of modern society in that it so often springs from a blind passion vainly seeking to sate itself in form, color, or sound. An artist can contemplate sensual beauty only when he loves all that surrounds him on earth. But if all he feels is loathing at the discrepancy between what he would wish the world to be and what it is in reality, then he is incapable of standing still and beholding. He is ashamed of reflexes of love; he is condemned to perpetual motion, to a restless sketching of discontinued, broken observations of nature. Like a sleep-walker, he loses his balance as soon as he stops moving. Beta’s [pseudonym for the writer Tadeusz Borowski] poems were whirlpools of fog, saved from complete chaos only by the dry rhythm of his hexameters. This character of his poetry must be attributed at least in part of the fact that he belonged to an ill-fated generation in an ill-fated nation, but he had thousands of brothers in all the countries of Europe, all of them passionate and deceived.

“All of them passionate and deceived.” Quite a line. Sitting here in the Charlotte airport waiting to board, and was moved by this passage, and Milosz’s observation that you can only really see the world around you if you first love it. If you hate it, it will remain opaque to you.

I think that many young people today are an ill-fated generation in an ill-fated nation, and passionate, and deceived. They have not been taught to love the world before setting out to understand or change it. So they rage against it, even against their bodies.