Czeslaw Milosz's Battle for Truth | Hacker News Reader

Czeslaw Milosz's Battle for Truth

newyorker.com

37 pointslermontov13 comments

His personal life aside, the big drama for him was the fact that the people he wrote for didn't really have much chance to read it. Sure, the underground press was well developed, but for most people getting Milosz's books wasn't easy at all. One couldn't even dream about reading his all works. Then, after 1989, his books were finally officially published - but at this point several of them were less relevant. For example one of his most famous works, The Captive Mind, had been written in 1951 - almost 40 years earlier, with clues and subtle references to some contemporary writers and situations. There was no way the readers of '89, especially more young ones, would appreciate it as much as those who the book was written for - and who couldn't read it then.

A depressed aristocrat finds himself yanked back from the US by his Marxist government and his friend asks her husband, the foreign minister, to let him go to Paris so he won't be depressed and he can write poetry? And he gets the Nobel Prize? The humanities are truly for the rich.

I think this is the most densely inaccurate comment I've seen on hackernews. It was hardly a Marxist government. Milosz was never rich. He wasn't allowed to move to Paris, only been sent there as a attache, until he ran away from the embassy and requested asylum.

Well, they were pretending to be Marxist at least.

Which is about as pretty close as any modern state gets to actually being "Marxist".

Oh, really? A colonel I worked for impressed on me the fundamental merit of always judging a situation by how a lance corporal (a young rifleman) would be treated in the same situation. It is a great way to mentally separate the effect of power and influence from the human issues involved.

Imagine an impoverished Polish farmer irking the central government enough to earn him a summons to Warsaw. I rather doubt he would be chatting about his problems with the foreign minister's wife.

Perhaps you are unaware of what it means to be an attache, but they are generally sent for a few years. They are most certainly moved to the country.

Please don't post polemical rants to HN. We're looking for thoughtful discussion and thoughtful conversation, and this is exactly the opposite.

Dang, see my supporting response below (1). I'm concerned about the depth of your thinking here. I wonder where "polemical rant" would fall in PG's list of labels used to suppress ideas (2). Just because someone's thesis is not in alignment with anyone else's doesn't make it a polemical rant. Especially when it's actually quite in alignment with the evidence, just presented differently (abundant evidence supports my thesis (3-5)).

Indeed, learning how to express one's sense of truth even if you don't have the entirety of the thing thought out is a central part of entrepreneurship, leadership, and just being decent. I submit it is with utmost humility that I expressed the zeroth iteration and appreciated encountering resistance: it is excellent for sharpening the thought. I know what I think. I need people to challenge me so I can clarify my position. I come here specifically for the follow-on question from someone who is not me.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14450217

(2) http://www.paulgraham.com/labels.html

(3) http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/4484...

(4) http://www.chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Go-to-Grad/4...

(5) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/college...

It's much simpler than that and doesn't merit a five-link rebuttal. Angry sharp-tongued rhetoric generates more angry sharp-tongued rhetoric, a.k.a. flamewars. We ask people not to comment that way and ban them if they keep doing it.

This is independent of your 'thesis', which I'm sure you could express in a thoughtful way if you wanted to.

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