Books in Brief: Visions from San Francisco Bay

Visions from San Francisco Bay, by Czeslaw Milosz (Farrar, 226 pp., $14.95). “I can boil it all down to three sets of pros and cons,” Czeslaw Milosz states near the end of this collection of philosophical essays: “for the so-called average man, against the arrogance of intellectuals; for the Biblical tradition, against the search for individual or collective nirvana; for science and technology, against the dreams of primeval innocence.” First published in Polish in 1969, these critical assessments and fanciful ruminations on America and Western civilization by a poet and Nobel Prize winner, now a professor at Berkeley, vibrate with a mystical piety reminiscent of Blake or Swedenborg. Milosz draws his energy from a lyrical, dialectical idealism that, as in the quotation above, pits God and order against atheism and chaos, knowledge against primitivism, and common perseverance against elitist withdrawal. (“Resignation to the inevitable is the heroism of the common people,” he says in his essay “Migrations,” praising the common people who migrated to the United States looking for a better life and endured hardship to survive.) Milosz views California, the westernmost point of the contiguous United States, as a metaphor both for what Western civilization has become, and for where it might go. It is the battleground for his three sets of pros and cons, the arena where past and future have spanned a chaotic present. Wide-ranging in his contemplations, Milosz manages to discuss Henry Miller, Herbert Marcuse, Robinson Jeffers, and Johann August Sutter (all transplanted Californians), as well as Marxism, the Marquis de Sade, and Herman Melville. Milosz’s visions, finally, are fueled by the clash between the old and the new, a clash with deeply personal roots. As a refugee from both Hitlerism and Stalinism, Milosz nostalgically recalls the European culture those madmen ravaged, at the same time realizing it was that very culture which produced such creatures. His final testament at the end of the book, regarding America and his own life, must simply be quoted: “I am certain only of my amazement. Amazement that something like America exists, and that humanity still exists, though it should have exterminated itself long ago or perished from starvation, from epidemics, or from the poisons it excretes. But amazement induces silent contemplation, and whenever I take up my pen, which itself pretends to knowledge, since language is composed of affirmations and negations, I treat that act only as the exorcism of the evil spirits of the present.”

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Phillip Corwin

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Visions from San Francisco Bay, by Czeslaw Milosz (Farrar, 226 pp., $14.95). “I can boil it all down to three sets of pros and cons,” Czeslaw Milosz states near the end of this collection of philosophical essays: “for the so-called average man, against the arrogance of intellectuals; for the Biblical tradition, against the search for individual or collective nirvana; for science and technology, against the dreams of primeval innocence.” First published in Polish in 1969, these critical assessments and fanciful ruminations on America and Western civilization by a poet and Nobel Prize winner, now a professor at Berkeley, vibrate with a mystical piety reminiscent of Blake or Swedenborg. Milosz draws his energy from a lyrical, dialectical idealism that, as in the quotation above, pits God and order against atheism and chaos, knowledge against primitivism, and common perseverance against elitist withdrawal. (“Resignation to the inevitable is the heroism of the common people,” he says in his essay “Migrations,” praising the common people who migrated to the United States looking for a better life and endured hardship to survive.) Milosz views California, the westernmost point of the contiguous United States, as a metaphor both for what Western civilization has become, and for where it might go. It is the battleground for his three sets of pros and cons, the arena where past and future have spanned a chaotic present. Wide-ranging in his contemplations, Milosz manages to discuss Henry Miller, Herbert Marcuse, Robinson Jeffers, and Johann August Sutter (all transplanted Californians), as well as Marxism, the Marquis de Sade, and Herman Melville. Milosz’s visions, finally, are fueled by the clash between the old and the new, a clash with deeply personal roots. As a refugee from both Hitlerism and Stalinism, Milosz nostalgically recalls the European culture those madmen ravaged, at the same time realizing it was that very culture which produced such creatures. His final testament at the end of the book, regarding America and his own life, must simply be quoted: “I am certain only of my amazement. Amazement that something like America exists, and that humanity still exists, though it should have exterminated itself long ago or perished from starvation, from epidemics, or from the poisons it excretes. But amazement induces silent contemplation, and whenever I take up my pen, which itself pretends to knowledge, since language is composed of affirmations and negations, I treat that act only as the exorcism of the evil spirits of the present.”