Resistance and Revolt

The Captive Mind 

by Czesław Miłosz

“A man may persuade himself, by the most logical reasoning, that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and, thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then the second; but at the third his stomach will revolt. In the same way, the growing influence of the doctrine on my way of thinking came up against the resistance of my whole nature.”   ― Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind




1911 saw the birth of Czesław Miłosz in central Lithuania, which was then a part of the Russian Empire. In two books, Native Realm, his memoir, and The Issa Valley, his novel, he wrote affectionately about his childhood in Lithuania. When he visited Paris in his twenties, he was impacted by the poetry of his distant cousin Oscar Milosz, a French poet with Lithuanian ancestry. The outcome, a collection of his own poems, was released in 1934. That year, he graduated from law school and again took advantage of a fellowship to spend a year in Paris. He was fired from his position as a commentator at Radio Wilno after returning to Poland due to his leftist beliefs.

Miłosz spent World War II in Warsaw, under Nazi Germany's "General Government," where, among other things, he attended underground lectures by Polish philosopher and historian of philosophy and aesthetics, Władysław Tatarkiewicz. He did not participate in the Warsaw Uprising due to his residence outside of Warsaw proper. Following the conflict, Miłosz worked as the communist People's Republic of Poland's cultural attaché in Paris. He did, however, defect in 1951 and seek political asylum in France. The Prix Littéraire Européen (European Literary Prize) was awarded to him in 1953.

Miłosz immigrated to the United States in 1960, obtained US citizenship in 1970, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980 for his work "Voiding man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts with uncompromising clear-sightedness." Many Poles were unaware of him for the first time, as the communist government had banned his works from being published in Poland. Miłosz continued to spend time annually in America but was able to return to Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain, first as a visitor and then as a part-time resident in Kraków. Miłosz was awarded the National Medal of Arts by the United States and an honorary doctorate by Harvard University in 1989. Through the Cold War, his name was often invoked in the United States, particularly by conservative commentators such as William F. Buckley, Jr., usually in the context of Miłosz's 1953 book The Captive Mind. During the same time, his name was largely ignored by the government-censored media and publications in Poland.

The Captive Mind has been described as one of the finest studies of the behavior of intellectuals under a repressive regime. In the preface, Miłosz observed that "I lived through five years of Nazi occupation... I do not regret those years in Warsaw.". But it is his analysis of Poland and her intellectuals under the heel of Soviet Communism that is the primary content of this book. Through the examples of four intellectuals, Milosz is able to capture the psychological impact on the lives of his countrymen. The criticism is devastating, and it has not lost its impact more than fifty years later. He even was prescient enough to speculate that the Soviet dictatorship might fall at some future date; little did he know in 1953 that it would come to pass less than thirty years later. This reader found that Milosz' prose is as beautifully written as his poetry, and he is an author to whom I will continue to return for inspiration.

Your Reading Life

The Intellectual Life: 

Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

by Antonin Sertillanges

"To speak is to listen to one's soul and to the truth within it.  To speak alone and wordlessly, as one does by writing, is to listen and perceive with a freshness of sensation like that of a man who rises in the early morning and holds his ear to nature." (p 200)

This is a book devoted to the intellectual life as a vocation.  It is in great part spiritual, but also practical and in its essence it demonstrates, I believe, the two are not at odds.  If at least part of your purpose in reading is to improve yourself this is a book that is for you. The title sounds imposing and the intellectual life is not for everyone, but if you take the time, and this is a short book, to consider the practical recommendations in this classic work you are likely to find aspects of the book that will prove useful in your reading life.  Also, do not be deterred by the mystical assumptions and aphorisms for "noble" minds may find the spiritual in themselves and nature.  This short book presents chapters on organization of one's work, time, and life.  However, the best chapter for me was chapter seven, "Preparation for Work", which focused on reading, memory, and note-taking. His recommendation for reading is to read little, but by that he means thinking about what you read rather than picking up just any book willy-nilly. More importantly he distinguishes between types of reading:
"One reads for one's formation and to become somebody; one reads in view of a particular task; one reads to acquire a habit of work and the love of what is good; one reads for relaxation."
It is up to the individual to decide how to allocate his reading time among these four areas and the author is primarily interested in promoting the first three kinds of reading. This is a good example of the type of practical advice that readers and thinkers may glean from this book. I found it both entertaining and educational and may return to it as my intellectual life progresses.  Perhaps the following quotation from the book is the best way to present the purpose and tone that imbues the spirit of the text:

“It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth.” 

The Intellectual Life by A. G. Sertillanges.  Catholic University of America Press, 1998 (1934)

Everyday Enlightenment

Blue Collar Intellectuals: 
When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America 

by Daniel J. Flynn

"A specific time and place gave rise to blue-collar intellectuals.  Twentieth-century America witnessed a democratization of education unparalleled in human history." and "Blue-collar intellectuals proved as unsettling to the intellectual elite as the nouveau riche had been to old money." (p 10)


I have neither the patience nor the political wonkism to view C-SPAN on a regular basis, but I am a frequent viewer of their cultural programming called BOOKTV on C-SPAN2 weekends. It was there that I saw Daniel J. Flynn lecture on the topic of his enlightening book, Blue Collar Intellectuals. Inspired, I acquired the book and was not disappointed with his stories of five intellectuals, outsiders with uncommon backgrounds, who reached out to "blue collar" people everywhere.
I first encountered one of the five intellectuals included in Flynn's book during my teen years reading science fiction. One of my favorite authors was Ray Bradbury and his tales, especially those of Humans and Martians collected in The Martian Chronicles. Flynn tells of Bradbury's impoverished family background as he grew up in the 1920s and his early reading of Edgar Allan Poe (also a favorite of mine since my pre-teen years) and others like Edgar Rice Burroughs. Even after he became famous for his own fantastic stories Bradbury was considered an outsider in traditional publishing circles, but maintained popularity with everyday folk. Time magazine labelled Bradbury "poet of the pulps" that seemed to sum up the cognoscenti's opinion of him.
My next encounter with the intellectuals that Daniel Flynn depicts did not begin until I was on my way to college at the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 1967. Required reading for all incoming freshmen was a short book by Eric Hoffer, The True Believer. This was my introduction to one of Flynn's "Blue Collar Intellectuals" and to a book that is as relevant today as it was forty-five years ago. While distant from Hoffer in his political philosophy, Milton Friedman shared similar blue collar background and an ability to explain complex ideas of economics to the readership of Newsweek magazine and also to the viewers of PBS through his multi-part series "Free to Choose". In that same year of 1967 as a freshman student in "Honors Economics" I read Friedman's most famous book, Capitalism and Freedom, and in it found some of the principles that I hold dear to this day.  These two experiences with blue-collar intellectuals belie somewhat Flynn's claim that these writers were all completely excluded from the realms of the cognoscenti, but they do not deflate his claim that they all had a special ability to communicate with the common man.
Also included in the book are sections on Will Durant, who went from anarchist speaker to become a popularizer of history both of philosophy and civilization, and while I have not read the eleven volumes of Will & Ariel Durants' History of Civilization from cover to cover, I have dipped in to sections of the books from time to time. Finally, he tells the story of Mortimer Adler who founded the "Great Books" movement and wrote many books explaining the ideas in those books. I, too, was inspired by the lure of great books and have spent more than twenty years of my adult life reading them in the Basic Program of Liberal Education at the University of Chicago. These form the foundation for my reading and my participation in the search (see The Moviegoer by Walker Percy).
In his book Daniel Flynn is able to clearly and succinctly elucidate the inspirational achievements of these blue collar intellectuals and how they shaped an era in which popular culture included a significant place for serious ideas. One of the most important lessons imparted by the lives of these intellectuals is how they inspired readers like myself to continue to read and learn and love the search for ideas in books.

Blue Collar Intellectuals by Daniel J. Flynn. ISI Books, 2011