January 27
Frosty day. A winter sun. White breath.
But on this Friday we didn’t know
what to celebrate and what to mourn–
it was Holocaust Memorial Day
and Mozart’s Birthday.
Our memory was perplexed.
Our imagination lost its way.
The candle on the windowsill wept
(we’d been asked to light candles),
but the gentle music of young Mozart
reached us from the speakers, rococo,
the age of silver wigs and not the gray hair
we knew from Auschwitz,
the age of costumes, not of nakedness,
hope and not despair.
Our memory was perplexed,
our imagination grew lost in thought.
—Adam Zagajewsky (1945– )
from Unseen Hand: Poems
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanaugh
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2011)
COMMENTARY
“Following the acts of reflection, the meaning of reality moves from the known to the knower and ultimately to the process that is structured by the participation of, and by the cognitive tension between, the knower and the known in the experience. The consciousness of reality becomes a process within reality.”
Eric Voegelin, What is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (Vol 28, The Collected Works), 113.