Free Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag

charming sobriety, Mysticism for Beginners . The world (of lyrical feeling, of ecstatic inwardness) to which poetry gives poets and their readers access is one that defective human nature bars us from inhabiting except fleetingly. Poems “don’t last,” Zagajewski observes wryly, “particularly the short lyric poems that prevail today.” All they can offer is “a moment of intense experience.” Prose is sturdier, if only because it takes longer to get through.
    Another Beauty is Zagajewski’s third book of prose to appear in English. The first two are made up of pieces, some essayistic, some memoiristic, with titles. The new book is a flow of untitled (and unnumbered) short and not so short takes. Its mix of narratives, observations, portraits, reflections, reminiscences gives Another Beauty a high-velocity variance of mood and attack that we associate more with a volume of poems—lyric poems, anyway—which is a succession of discontinuous intensities, at different pitches of concern.
    What kind of intensities? (That is, what kind of prose?) Thoughtful, precise; rhapsodic; rueful; courteous; prone to wonder. Then and now, here and there—the whole book oscillates, vibrates, with contrasts. (This is like this, but that is like that. Or: we expected this, but we got that.) And everything reeks of dissimilarity, savor, message, metaphor. Even the weather:

    The meteorological depressions of Paris have an oceanic feel; the Atlantic dispatches them in the direction of the continent. The winds blow, dark clouds scurry across the city like racecars. The rain falls at a spiteful slant. At times the heavens’ face appears, a scrap of blue. Then it’s dark again, the Seine becomes a black pavement. The lowlands of Paris seethe with oceanic energy, thunderbolts pop like champagne corks. Whereas a typical Central European depression—centered somewhere above the Carpathians—behaves completely differently: it’s subdued and melancholy, one might say philosophical. The clouds barely move. They’re shaped differently; they’re like an enormous blimp drooping over Kraków’s Central Market. The light shifts gradually; the violet glow fades, giving way to yellow spotlights. The sun skulks somewhere behind silken clouds, illuminating the most varied
strata of earth and sky. Some of the clouds resemble deep-sea fishes that have ascended to the surface and swim with mouths wide open, as if startled by the taste of air. This kind of weather can last for several days, the meek climate of Central Europe. And if, after lengthy deliberations, a thunderstorm does strike, it behaves as if it were stuttering. Instead of a sharp, decisive shot, it emits a series of drawn-out sounds, pa pa pa pa —an echo instead of a blast. Thunder on the installment plan.

    In Zagajewski’s rendering, nature turns out to be wittily steeped in the bathos of national histories, with the crisp, bullying weather of Paris flaunting France’s indefatigable good fortune and Kraków’s tired, melancholy weather summing up Poland’s innumerable defeats and other woes. The poet can’t escape history, only transmute it sometimes, for purposes of bravura descriptiveness, into magic geography.
     
     
    MAY YOU BE BORN in interesting times, runs the ancient (or at least proverbial) Chinese curse. Updated for our own hyperinteresting era, it might run: May you be born in an interesting place.
    What Czeslaw Milosz calls, mordantly, “the privilege of coming from strange lands where it is difficult to escape history”—think of Poland, Ireland, Israel, Bosnia—prods and pinches, exalts and exhausts a writer like Zagajewski whose standards are set by world literature. History means strife. History means tragic impasse—and your friends being jailed or killed. History means perennial challenges to the nation’s very right to exist. Poland, of course, had two centuries of history’s chokehold—from the First Partition in 1772, which in a few years brought