I won't tell all regardless. Since nothing much is happening anyway. I represent, moreover, the Eastern European school of discretion; we don't discuss divorces, we don't acknowledge depressions. Life proceeds peacefully around me, a gray and exceptionally warm December outside my window. A few concerts. A gifted young singer performed in the Lawyers' Club. Yesterday we went to a beautiful concert of Shostakovich's music (they also played the string quartet, Au-delà d'une absence, that his biographer Krzysztof Meyer composed and dedicated to him). I heard another piece for the first time, the Vocal-Instrumental Suite for Soprano, Violin, Cello, and Piano, op. 27, set to seven poems by Alexander Blok. Students from the Music Academy played: brimming with enthusiasm, technically marvelous. The final work, that suite, made a tremendous impression on M. and me. The concert marked the hundredth anniversary of Shostakovich's birth and so had a special charge, an extra jolt. The students lit candles on the stage and used just a few spotlights. They achieved an extraordinary kind of concentration. It's often like that when you hear young performers, still unspoiled by routine, by careers, young musicians playing joyfully, with their whole body, their whole soul.

* * *

The sense of joy nearly every time I find myself on Krakow's main square. In every season, at every time of day, I admire the space's majesty, the odd, cubistically arranged structures, symmetry and asymmetry conjoined, the airy Italian Cloth Hall set alongside the Marian Cathedral's Gothic gravity, like gigantic building blocks.

* * *

I'm reading about Gottfried Benn in Poetry magazine. Warsaw's World Literature just published a hefty selection of his poems, letters, and essays in a thick issue dedicated to Benn and Brecht. Both died in 1956, and the iron law of anniversaries unites them posthumously, fifty years after their deaths — two poets who have absolutely nothing else in common. Benn began to mock the application of Marxist theory to literature early on. His scornful attitude set him apart in leftist, literary Berlin, in the years before Hitler seized power: the unyielding aesthete amid the doctrinaire improvers of humanity ... I go back to Benn's poems every so often, and they almost always electrify me ("Jena vor uns im lieblichen Tale ..."); so do bits of his essays and virtually all his letters to Mr. Oelze, the businessman from Bremen. The letters are offhanded, a bit cynical at times, now and then a moment of pure poetry gleams. A petit bourgeois par excellence, Benn led the modest life of a craftsman (although, as we know, he was a doctor, a dermatologist, but he never earned much). In Oelze — whom he idealized, glorified, endowed with a higher social rank than he in fact possessed — he found an audience for his own ideas, observations, provocations, and projects.

* * *

I've been reading Karl Corino's thick biography of Robert Musil. Musil wrote a beautiful speech when Rilke died — he was among those who recognized the poet's greatness early on. I also found a description of the tragicomic talk Musil gave at the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris in June 1935. He had no idea that the Congress had been organized by the Communists, and thus only Hitler's system was open to criticism: the Soviet Union was off-limits. But Musil defended the artist's individualism and warned against the collectivism emerging in various European nations. He insisted, too, that there was no connection between culture and politics, that culture's very existence depends upon some delicate, capricious, unpredictable element, hence even a decent political system won't automatically produce great art. Some participants at that famous Congress even booed him; they'd been expecting propagandistic pronouncements, not considered, objective reflections. Corino also writes a great deal about Musil's poverty; he even considered suicide in the thirties, when he couldn't foresee any financial possibilities for him and his wife. Both the Nazis and the Communists attacked him — the very title of his great novel, The Man Without Qualities, must have angered them equally. After all, they labored to create a new man with sharply defined qualities. For both groups, he represented a "bourgeois epoch in decline." (But of course that bourgeois epoch didn't decline — or perhaps it declined and then recovered.) Musil spent the last years of his life in exile in Switzerland, where he lived even more modestly, in poverty and isolation. Thomas Mann was an important figure to him; he felt both love and hate, Hassliebe, as the Germans say, for the great writer. Everything turned out for Mann: even emigration wasn't a disaster. Those who knew Musil described the nervous trembling that overcame him whenever he heard the name Mann mentioned in conversation. Musil's perfect description of The Magic Mountain: the novel resembles a "shark's stomach." Mann's great novel contains, he meant, undigested fragments of existing European systems of thought, ideologies, and so on. Whereas The Man Without Qualities operates on an entirely different principle; all the references to political and philosophical reality have an intermediate character, they're mystical, allusive. Musil was captivated by der Möglichkeitssinn, the sense of possibility, by whatever happens exclusively in the conditional. The question remains: maybe, from this point of view, Mann was right to toss thick chunks of actual ideas into The Magic Mountain.

* * *

In Poland, Christmas is the most deeply, consistently familial of holidays. Everyone celebrates at home. Christmas Eve is the pivotal moment. Houses and apartments become bastions of family egotism, family love, if you will. Lone souls must suffer all kinds of tortures if nobody from one family or another thinks to invite them ... You can't count on restaurants, they're closed. This year Christmas Eve came on Sunday; by morning the streets were silent. On Thursday and Friday I saw dozens of students heading off to the railroad station with their backpacks and bags; Krakow empties out. By 7:00 p.m., the city is a ghost town. The Main Square, which throngs with people every other day (and even night), was dark, deserted, as in the war. M. and I went for a walk, we strolled through the square, we couldn't get over the eerie silence, darkness, emptiness. The countless restaurants in every storefront of the square were — all! — shut, unlit. We noticed only one spot on the square's expanse where some enterprising type had set up shop, suspecting that hungry, thirsty people might still turn up. In an improvised wooden shed three cooks fried sausages and chops and reheated cabbage and potatoes. This single warm and well-lit spot drew all the tourists, who certainly couldn't understand why the normally welcoming restaurants had all closed shop. Why the churches were shut (and would reopen their doors only after midnight mass). They didn't know that priests, too, were sitting down to dinners including at least twelve courses, that borscht steamed on the tabletops. Japanese, Italian, French, and American tourists lined up for their humble sausages. We sat for a moment at one of the improvised tables, it wasn't too cold. The tourists alongside us inhaled the scent of cooked meat steaming up from plastic plates. Honey-colored drops of mustard on white trays. An oasis. It was a caricature of Bethlehem, that well-lit place beneath its wooden roof. I told M. I could imagine a play that might capture something of that moment. The silent city and tourists' hushed talk. So write it. But I can't.

* * *

I can't write poems in recent weeks either. It's not the first time it's happened. And it's not worth going on about either. There's not much to tell. Karol Berger found something Victor Hugo said on the subject — he told me about it as we were walking in Paris, in the 16ème. When someone asked him how hard it was to write poetry, he answered, "When you can write it, it's easy, when you can't, it's impossible."

* * *

The fall was long, warm, and mild, and I often passed little Boguslawski Street. St. Sebastian Street runs right beside it, a narrow passage transporting you from the Catholic city center to Jewish Kazimierz. At one point you walk along a wall concealing an enormous monastery garden. Then you cross Dietl Street, built where a branch of the Vistula once cut the city of Kazimierz off from Krakow like a moat — and you're in a different world. I usually pass the yellow-orange building where Czeslaw Milosz lived for some years. A tablet commemorates this. Before, the tablet wasn't there, but Czeslaw was. And Carol, his wife, who looked after the flowerbed in the courtyard. On the second floor, in an apartment that was first expanded, when they bought the place next door, and then, after his death, divided up again, as part of the estate. Boguslawski Street is empty now. An extraordinary person, an exceptional mind once lived there, someone who defied the tendencies of his time (but who said we should yield to the age's tendencies?), who tried to synthesize all the events and ideas of his historical moment. He was the only serious intellectual I knew who studied even the Harry Potter series. What for? To find out what children were reading, what draws them, and what it says about a shifting world. He good-naturedly acknowledged Harry Potter; nothing bad in it, he said in his baritone. He was more like Thomas Mann than Robert Musil: only what really existed stirred him, not Möglichkeitssinn, not the sense of possibilities. He didn't lack for mystical appetites, but his mysticism fed on the yeast of reality. In the long poems he was a shark. And a shark in his reading, devouring theology and philosophy, poetry and history. I think of this when I meet young poets on both sides of the Atlantic. Sometimes they seem to notice only the most recent issue of the trendiest poetry journal. As if poetry weren't — among other things — a response to the state of a world that shows itself in a thousand different forms, the grief of the unemployed man sitting on a park bench on a lovely April day alongside philosophical treatises and symphonies.

* * *

In November an evening dedicated to the poetry of Stanislaw Baranczak in Manggha, Krakow's Japanese cultural center. Swarms of people, mainly students, one of those events where you have to get there a half hour early just to find a seat. It was organized by the Publishing House a5; Ryszard Krynicki invited a group of Krakow poets to read a poem each from Baranczak's newly published Selected Poems. Wislawa Szymborska received the privilege of reading one of Baranczak's loveliest poems, "She Cried at Night." I read a poem from Winter's Journey, his extraordinary variations on the poems Franz Schubert used for his Winterreise. A minor Romantic poet, Wilhelm Müller, wrote the original German poems, which would most likely have vanished if they hadn't been amplified by Schubert's marvelous music. In haste, impatient, the music hurries like fate. Its energetic, almost military rhythms contrast sharply with the deceleration winter brings to Northern Europe. Snow, frost, and mist slow life's tempo; fires crackle in chimneys, smoke rises slowly and uncertainly toward a cloudy sky. Baranczak's versions are both completely original and a perfect fit metrically for the music. Read separately, as individual poems, the impression they make may not be as great as "She Cried at Night," for example. Taken whole, though, in all their hallucinogenic melancholy, their thematic hints at modernity (an airplane, an urban street), a certain indefinable symbolism, they are unforgettable. Stanislaw, who suffers from a prolonged illness, couldn't travel from Boston, where he's lived for twenty-five years.

* * *

Today in the morning mail a present from Faber and Faber Limited, Ted Hughes's Selected Translations, edited by Daniel Weissbort. (Daniel Weissbort once drove me to the airport many years ago, early spring, in Iowa.) I begin the day by reading Yehuda Amichai in Hughes's translation. Amichai's poems burst with meaning; each line has something to tell us. Poetry involves two opposing kinds of textual "concentration": poetry as a fabric (where, as in the poetry of Saint-John Perse, the language stays consistently equidistant from a well-concealed center) and poetry as statement. Amichai is a royal representative of this second option, as is Herbert. Born in the same year, 1924, both these great poets have so much to say that they could never follow Saint-John Perse's lead in creating endless rhetorical epics. A certain resemblance links the two poets, whose imaginations fix on war and love (there's more love in Amichai) and are tempered by the classics in whom they placed their faith. Amichai read the Hebrew Bible, while Herbert had his Greeks. They must have sensed the kinship: they liked and admired each other. I met Amichai only once, at a festival in Rotterdam in, I think, 1983. He told me over breakfast at the hotel that he cared most about poets and artists born in 1924. I thought then that I'd been born too late. (I don't think so now.)

* * *

While sorting through my papers (something I should do more often), I came upon a clipping from a local paper, a review, by a young critic, of one of my books. The piece's title: "Old Wave." A typical example of disinterested and pointless malice. Since we all have to die someday, even young reviewers.

* * *

I'm reading Gerschom Scholem's essays, his polemics and intellectual portraits (the portrait of Rosenzweig, a polemic with Buber, and so on). As always when I read an intelligent author who writes with passion about the sacrum, I'm filled with religious yearnings.

* * *

Cioran takes Proust to task somewhere for the role music plays in his great novel. One of the book's central themes, it weaves and twines around the heroes' personal adventures. It prompts associations with concrete events from the past — but it doesn't open up onto something "altogether different." It's an intriguing observation. But who makes it? Cioran, who in most of his dazzling aphorisms strives to convince us that this "altogether different" doesn't exist. Only after hearing a Bach cantata or passion does he momentarily change his mind.

* * *

A poem is like a human face — it is an object that can be measured, described, cataloged, but it is also an appeal. You can heed an appeal or ignore it, but you can't simply measure its meter. You can't gauge a flame's height with a ruler.

* * *

My students and I read the poems of the Swedish writer Göran Sonnevi in Rika Lesser's translation — in manuscript, since this splendid volume couldn't find a publisher. In these truly wonderful poems — meditative, linking deeply personal elements with observations derived from physics and biology — music nearly becomes God. My friend in Berlin, the German writer Hartmut Lange, says something similar about music, especially Mahler's Song of the Earth. I argued with him about it, even though I listen to music constantly and Song of the Earth is one of my favorite works. I argued, since I can't see identifying music with God ... Poets who listen to pop music — their numbers are growing — don't seem to have the same mystical leanings. The same is true of jazz; I don't see it leading to idolatry.

* * *

I may be one of the few writers, not counting theologians, who raises now and then the notion of the "spiritual life." In our time we tend to speak, at best, of "imagination." It is a marvelous word and encompasses a great deal, but not everything. Some people look at me suspiciously because of this; they see me as a reactionary or at the very least a far-right-winger. I lay myself open to ridicule. Progressive circles rebuke me or else look down their noses. Conservatives don't understand it either. Poets a generation younger refuse to maintain relations with me. Only one young Spanish poet told me in Barcelona that my essays may signal that ironic postmodernism will someday be vanquished. But what is the spirit, spiritual life? If only I were better at defining things! Robert Musil says that the spirit is the synthesis of intellect and emotion. It's a good working definition, a bit minimalist. It's easier to say — as the theologists know — what the spirit isn't, in poetry, in literature. This approach isn't psychoanalytic, behavioral, sociological, or political. It's comprehensive; it reflects, like an astronaut's helmet, the earth, the stars, and the human face.