Miłosz at the Faculty Club
Monday, June 11th, 2012
My friend Mike Ross immediately thought of me when he read today’s post from “The Rice History Corner” blog at his alma mater, Rice University in Houston. (I’m flattered.) It features a Czesław Miłosz having lunch at the university’s faculty club with Prof. Ewa Thompson. The Nobel poet recorded a program for KUHT-TV with Thompson and other Houston writers and scholars, and also gave a talk at the University of Houston.
Zagajewski provided another Houston link
The column is written by the university’s “centennial historian,” who doesn’t give her name. She has good taste, though: Patrick Kurp‘s blog Anecdotal Evidence is at the top of her blogroll. Moreover, she delights in such poets as Zbigniew Herbert and Adam Zagajewski, as well as Miłosz.
The connection between Miłosz and Houston rang a bell in other ways. Adam Zagajewski arrived on the campus of the University of Houston in 1988, and later launched a program connecting the students in Texas with Miłosz in Kraków. So the link between Miłosz and Houston is stronger than might be supposed.
Meanwhile, in my perambulations around the web, I found Christopher Hitchens‘s “The Captive Mind Now,” words written on Miłosz’s death in 2004, in which he revisits the landmark Captive Mind and “ketman,” and somehow brings Azar Nafisi‘s Reading Lolita in Tehran into the mix, with its dedication from the Polish poet’s “Annalena”:
To whom do we tell what happened on the
Earth, for whom do we place everywhere huge
Mirrors in the hope that they will be filled up
And will stay so?
“The Hitch” concludes: “The long-term achievement of Milosz was to have scrutinized, not just in between but clean through, and well beyond, the party ‘lines’ that claim for themselves exclusive truth. In doing so he shamed the so-called intellectuals who managed the ugly trick of denying freedom to their own minds, the better to visit the same deprivation upon others.”
