Books May 1996
What the devil said
A review of Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast by Tomas Venclova.
If I only could put my numb fingers
into the wounds of Man. These truly do not heal.
Ever:
The rest is silence.
—Aleksander Wat, “On Good Friday”
These lines conclude a poem written by the dissident Polish poet and essayist Aleksander Wat less than two months before his suicide in 1967. They capture the central concerns of Wat’s life and art: the tension between a deep need for faith and an instinctive, pervasive doubt; the senselessness of most human suffering; and the failure of language. After the horrors of this century—many of which Wat experienced firsthand—he found belief in God all but impossible and the...
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