Free Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag Page B

Gliwice to attend university, and where he remained until he was thirty-seven.
    Dates are sparse in Another Beauty, and the arrangement of stories-from-a-life is unchronological. But there is, implicitly, always a where , with which the poet’s heart and senses are in dialogue. Not the traveler, not even the émigré—most of the great Polish poets have gone westward, and Zagajewski is not one of the exceptions—but the continually stimulated city dweller is featured here. There are few living rooms and no bedrooms in Another Beauty , but more than a few public squares and libraries and trains. Once he’s past his student years, the occasional “we” disappears; there is only an “I.” Occasionally he will mention where he is writing: Zagajewski now lives in Paris and teaches one term each year at the University of Houston. “I’m strolling through Paris,” one entry begins. “And at this very moment I’m listening to the Seventh Symphony in Houston,” notes another. There are always two cities: Lwów and Gliwice, Gliwice and Kraków, Paris and Houston.
    More poignant oppositions infuse this book: self and others, youth
and age. There are plangent evocations of difficult elderly relatives and cranky professors: this portrait of the poet as a young man is striking for its tenderness toward the old. And the account of the decorous ardors, literary and political, of his student years sets his book quite at odds with the narcissistic purposes, and pointedly indiscreet contents, of most autobiographical writing today For Zagajewski, autobiography is an occasion to purge oneself of vanity, while advancing the project of self-understanding—call it the wisdom project—which is never completed, however long the life.
    To describe oneself as young is to face that one is no longer young. And a pithy acknowledgment that the debilities of age approach, with death in their train, is one of the many observations that cut short a story from Zagajewski’s past. Telling the stories discontinuously, as glimpses, secures several good results. It keeps the prose dense, quick. And it invites telling only those stories that lead to some insight, or epiphany. There is a larger lesson in the very way of telling, a lesson in moral tone: how to talk about oneself without complacency. Life, when not a school for heartlessness, is an education in sympathy. The sum of the stories reminds us that in a life of a certain length and spiritual seriousness, change—sometimes not for the worse—is just as real as death.
     
     
    ALL WRITING IS a species of remembering. If there is anything triumphalist about Another Beauty it is that the acts of remembering the book contains seem so frictionless. Imagining—that is, bringing the past to mental life—is there as needed; it never falters; it is by definition a success. The recovery of memory, of course, is an ethical obligation: the obligation to persist in the effort to apprehend the truth. This seems less apparent in America, where the work of memory has been exuberantly identified with the creation of useful or therapeutic fictions, than in Zagajewski’s lacerated corner of the world.
    To recover a memory—to secure a truth—is a supreme touchstone of value in Another Beauty. “I didn’t witness the extermination of the Jews,” Zagajewski writes:

    I was born too late. I bore witness, though, to the gradual process by which Europe recovered its memory. This memory moved slowly, more like a lazy, lowland river than a mountain stream, but it finally, unambiguously condemned the evil of the Holocaust and the Nazis, and the evil of Soviet civilization as well (though in this it was less successful, as if reluctant to admit that two such monstrosities might simultaneously coexist).

    That memories are recovered—that is, that the suppressed truths do reemerge—is the basis of whatever hope one can have for justice and a modicum of sanity in the ongoing life of communities.
    Once