JOSEPH BRODSKY
Less Than One
SELECTED ESSAYS
FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX New York
The author wishes to express his gratitude to the John and Catherine MacAtlhur Foundation for its five years of generous support.
In memory of my mother and my father In memory of Carl Ray Proffer
Contents
Less Than One I 3
The Keening Muse I 34
Pendulum's Song I 53
A Guide to a Renamed City I 69
In the Shadow of Dante I 95
On Tyranny I 113
TheChild of Civilization I 123
Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980): An Obituary I 145
The Powerof the Elements I 157
The Soundof the Tide I 164
A Poet and Prose I 176
Footnote to a Poem I 195
Catastrophes in the Air I 268
On "September 1, 1939" by W. H. Auden I 304
To Please a Shadow I 357
A Commencement Address I 384
Flight from Byzantium I 393
InaRoomandaHalf I 447
And the heart doesn't die when one thinks itshould.
Czeslaw Milosz, "Elegy for N.N."
Less Than One
Less Than One
i
As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.
I remember rather little of my life and what I do remember is of small consequence. Most of the thoughts I now recall as having been interesting to me owe their significance to the time when they occurred. If any do not, they have no doubt been expressed much better by someone else. A writer's biography is in his twists of language. I remember, for instance, that when I was about ten or eleven it occurred to me that Marx's dictum that "existence conditions consciousness" was true only for as long as it takes consciousness to acquire the art of estrangement; thereafter, consciousness is on its own and can both condition and ignore existence. At that age, this was surely a discovery—but one hardly worth recording, and surely it had been better stated by others. And does it really matter who first cracked the mental cuneiform of which "existence conditions consciousness" is a perfect example
So I am writing all this not in order to set the record straight (there is no such record, and even if there is, it is an insignificant one and thus not yet distorted), but mostly for the usual reason why a writer writes—to give or to get a boost from the language, this time from a foreign one. The little I remember becomes even more diminished by being recollected in English.