The traces of otherness : the mediterranean culture in Walter Pater and Zbigniew Herbert

Abstract

Why this essay? Both dedicated and indebted to Greek (and Roman) culture, both sensitive to aesthetic values of literature, Walter Pater (1839—1894), an English aesthete, writer and critic of arts of the fin‑de‑siècle and Zbigniew Herbert (1924—1998), one of the greatest Polish poets of the 20th century are somehow similar in their reflections on literature, art, and historical times. Pater owes his fame to an inspiring opus The Renaissance Studies while Herbert’s Mr Cogito is not only the poet’s alter ego but also the spokesman of the poet’s most discrete thoughts and reflections concerning life, mortality, and immortality (“otherness”). Most interestingly, Herbert expressed his political thoughts in the times when freedom in his homeland was much threatened and man’s “open, vulnerable and porous” self (Charles Taylor) had to be “buffered.” Therefore, the reference to ancient culture of Greeks and Romans could serve as the best way of camouflaging one’s true thoughts and expressing what had to remain understated. Pater and Herbert were great thinkers, good philosophers of literature, and eminent writers whose styles of writing in English (of the former) and in Polish (of the latter) can expose best philological qualities in the sense “philology” was once defined by Nietzsche as “the goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of words.” This is the reason I selected this essay as one in which I wished to show my ultimate dedication and gratitude to both men of letters, my high respect for most eminent philologists of their times who became great “jewelers of words” never afraid of writing freely about what haunted their minds and puzzled their thoughts.