The struggle to preserve memory, to gather some truth from lived experience, has plagued generations of poets. Coming to terms with the absurdities of life, the randomness of nature, and the inevitability of old age has enveloped even the youngest of writers. But those, like Virgil or Czesław Miłosz, who lived through some of the most important events in human history—those who were forced to migrate, move, adapt, and forget—suffer greatly under the burden of memory. They struggle to remember what everyone else has forgotten. Religion claims to answer these conundrums: remembrance, religion teaches, comes through deeper study and scholarship, through greater devotion to the sacred. But how can we hope to find holiness among the bangs and whistles of ordinary life? How can we expect divine meaning in a world of bright lights?
Calvin and Hobbes, the deeply philosophical comic strip that fascinated readers for nearly a decade, sought to make sense of the absurdities of life, to help its readers find meaning in ordinary routine and childlike imagination. Though often overlooked as a work of literature, the strip is deeply intellectual. Its main characters, a six year-old boy and his tiger living in Midwestern suburbia, are the embodiment of the idealism and innocence of the young and the corruption of modern materialism. Calvin and Hobbes find solace in doing nothing, in the pure experience of nature and life. Their answers are never straightforward, never easy to capture, but they manage to articulate the deeply human struggle of remaining intellectually grounded while trying to make sense of time and tragedy.
In The Georgics, Virgil addresses the same questions and arrives at similar answers. The Georgics appear at first to be superfluous meditations on agriculture and technical descriptions of farming and horticultural practices, yet Virgil’s language reveals a contemplative writer bent on revealing much more about life than pastoral esoterica. In his description of the care of ailing bees, he writes:
To Virgil, farming is much more than a practical matter. It is about preserving a deeper ancestral knowledge of nature, preserving the ancient ways of life. To him, farming and nature are companions in the listlessness, absurdity, and pain of life. The bees represent not only an ancient, divine connection, but a reckoning with the shared misery of existence. Most important, however, nature is a place from which to find renewal and hope in the midst of violence and evil. Throughout The Georgics, Virgil references the recent assasination of Caesar and the outbreak of war that followed. He sees nature as the embodiment of virtue and redemption, a retreat from war to think divinely and agriculturally instead of politically and monetarily.
Czesław Miłosz, the great Polish poet and Nobel Laureate, often touches upon similar themes in his work. Like Virgil, Miłosz lived through some of the greatest horror and turbulence the world had seen. He lived through World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Polish invasion of Lithuania, Nazi occupation, the Holocaust, and stifling Soviet rule. He spent the early part of his life constantly on the run, fleeing from the latest enemy of humanity and art. In “City Without a Name,” Miłosz captures his journey from witnessing the horrors of World War II to his life in California. This poem is a reflection on the struggle to remember and the struggle to move on, the struggle to preserve the soul and the struggle to preserve the body. His are the meditations of a poet of tumultuous times, the daily drudgery of a spirit that has known far more horror and feeling than it is due:
How do we preserve memory and humanity among endless trauma and the extremes of emotion? How can we possibly remember everything that mattered at some point in our lives? Miłosz struggles with these questions on a more dramatic scale than most of us, filling his verses with references to Nazi massacres and the emptiness of Death Valley. His answer is much more complicated than Virgil’s, yet they both find some truth in nature: Miłosz in the residue of procreation and the empty, harrowing landscapes of his life; Virgil in the pastoral scenes and human-like creatures of rural life. Miłosz finds the solace Virgil locates in nature in the act of memory itself, the rhythm of the words and the varying shape of his verse. Memory, he is forced to realize, is fleeting, deeply personal, and unconquerable.
Stylistically, the two poems are vastly different. Both works are translated from Latin and Polish respectively, so it is difficult to compare their language, but as one would imagine, Virgil’s language is much more exact, his verse far more traditional and stoic. Miłosz writes with concise varying poetry that covers a wide span in few words. Both Virgil and Miłosz write with evocative imagery that remains concise and easily accessible, mixing in snippets of philosophy, history, and divinity.
Benjamin Braddock, the protagonist of The Graduate, one of the most innovative and transformative films of the past sixty years, struggles with the same existential angst as he returns to suburban Los Angeles from college. At first, he seems to find emotional release and shared struggle in his loveless affair with an older family friend, Mrs. Robinson. The unfortunate Braddock falls madly in love with the daughter of the older woman, Elaine, setting off a series of events that lead to him interrupting Elaine’s wedding and escaping with her in her wedding gown on a bus. In one of the most famous final scenes in cinema history, Braddock and Elaine’s faces slowly change from elation and joy to profound uncertainty and worry. This, in short, is the universal struggle of our age; we have all won our prize, found some degree of success, but we are unsure of the results. At our core, the only truth we know is the truth of experience. Memory is the imperfect form that seeks to preserve this truth.