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A Love Affair With Nature
| Article
# : |
11616 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
8,872 Words |
| Author
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Aleksander Fiut
Aleksander Fiut is a specialist in contemporary Polish
literature who teaches at Indiana University at
Bloomington. "A Love Affair with Nature" is a fragment of his
book An Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz. A guide
to the abbreviations used in this piece appears on page 355. |
Many years passed before Milosz decided to reveal his first and perhaps his greatest love affairs - a love affair which, as it turned out, to a great extent shaped his outlook and poetic worldview. Milosz concealed its complex meaning in the cognitive adventures of Thomas in The Issa Valley and finally explained it only in Visions from San Francisco Bay in the chapter entitled, significantly, "Remembrance of a Certain Love." The object of his adoration was not a woman, as would be expected, but Nature, which fascinated him as a little boy with all its limitless splendor of colors, forms, and shapes. As in every adventure of the heart, the enchantment with physical beauty and the need for idealization was accompanied by a strong, erotically tinged desire for possession. As Milosz admits,
But I was falling so totally in love, let us be properly suspicious, through an intermediary. What really fascinated me were the color illustrations in nature books and atlases, not the Juliet of nature, but her portrait rendered by draftsmen or photographers. I suffered no less sincerely for that, a suffering caused by the excess which could not be possessed; I was an unrequited romantic lover, until I found the way to dispel that invasion of desires, to make the desired object mine - by naming it. I made columns in thin notebooks and filled them with my pedantic categories - family, species, genus - until the names, the noun signifying the species and the adjective the genus, became one with what they signified, so that Emberiza citrinella did not live in thickets but in an ideal space outside of time. (V, 18)
The end of the affair was a rude awakening: Suspicion, critical reflection - what had been a sheaf of colors, an undifferentiated vibration of light, instantly turns into a set of characteristics and falls under the sway of statistics. And so, even my real birds became illustrations from an anatomical atlas covered by an illusion of lovely feathers, and the fragrance of flowers ceased to be extravagant gifts, becoming part of an impersonally calculated plan, examples of a universal law. My childhood, too, ended then. I threw my notebooks away, I demolished the paper castle where beauties had resided behind a lattice of words. (V, 18-19)
Perhaps the most striking feature of this confession is the motif of disillusionment, of loss, of expulsion from a childhood paradise. The passage to adulthood constitutes a drastic break with an intimate and pure, because it is unconscious, bond with nature that almost spontaneously identifies with the entire world. Consciousness destroys the illusion of self-identification and identification
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