The Seizure of Power

A good author creates characters who sit beside you while you while are reading and walks beside you when you are not. Sometimes you identify with them, sometimes not; sometimes you empathise with them, sometimes sympathise, sometimes neither. A good author writes characters into life.

But have you ever encountered a character who is you? One who tricks you into believing you're not alone or crazy, until you remember that they're fictional. (Perhaps that is better - they will remain frozen in time, never disappoint you and never grow into someone you don't recognise.)

Peter Kwinto (Quinto) in The Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz is my fictional doppelganger. He is an officer in the half-Russian, half-Polish army that is pushing back the German troops who have captured (and razed) Warsaw at the end of World War II. At the beginning of the novel, he is plagued by conflicting emotions, but is essentially idealistic, justifying the fear the army instills on communities already traumatised by war as part of the process of attaining freedom.

Despite having been exiled to the Urals and now implicated in the tragedies of war, he remains idealistic about life and human nature: "The bliss of being among the living... Peter lifted his hand and moved his fingers, overcome with wonder at the year, the month, the day and the hour."

As the war ends, Polish Socialists fight the influence of Russian Communists, who believe they have equal rights to the minds of the Polish people given that they made up half of the victorious army. Those minds are plagued by unexpressed doubts: about whether the Socialists can offer anything different to the Communists or the capitalists, about the future, about whether the war has really ended.

Peter is no different, except that these doubts coalesce into doubts about humanity, about the repetition of history, about the nature of time and existence. After he learns that his wife is dead, these doubts became increasingly, conflictingly hopeful and nihilistic. The death of his wife confirms what he has always known: that he is alone.

He comes to believe (hope?) that only a traumatic history can create a utopian future, through incremental changes in the collective consciousness. Thus he, stuck in this traumatic moment, can only hope for the absence of death or the absolution of escape.

Yet, in appearance, he bends to the requirements of society, acquiring a job in the government and even informing on another man. This leads to other doubts - about one's accountability for one's self, toward other people, within a community. Is this accountability or blame, and with whom does it rest?

Around him, people smooth over these doubts saying, "Everyone plays a part nowadays and nobody believes in anything."

Despite the absolute statements that he finds in doubt, Peter is essentially at the whim of his emotions. Towards the end of the novel, he cries, "Why? Why are you responsible for what you really are? Can anybody say: 'I am myself' when he worships in spite of himself, worships what he hates?"

The final line embodies Peter's quest: "...was it not better, instead, to ponder the only important question: how a man could preserve himself from the taint of sadness and indifference."

I wonder, how can one not come to the same conclusions, not be assailed by the same doubts and the same conflicting emotions, focus on the everyday when questions like these, seemingly only theoretical, form the foundations of this moment in time? Life is an eddy of trauma and joy and more, but these become blurred in the larger context of human history. There are really only two options in this moment: to escape or to find whatever joy one can in each day. Sometimes the two options are the same.