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Imperfect Faith
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16914 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1990 |
4,009 Words |
| Author
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Richard Lourie
Richard Lourie is the author of Sakharov: A Biography. |
The only thing simple and certain about the Polish writer Aleksander Wat is that he was born in Warsaw in 1900 and died in Paris in 1967. Although his fate, and the intellect he used to contemplate that fate, was highly convoluted, there is a basic theme and drama to Wat's life. Wat was one of those born with a hunger for meaning and for whom meaninglessness was an assault on his bodily health and sanity. Without order and faith, he was disconsolate. Hearty indifference was not an option for him. He required a purpose for everything in creation, from the inertness of minerals to the songs of he human mind.
That was Aleksander Wat, and, since character is destiny, that was also the story of his life, revealed when the foliage of detail is pushed aside. All his writings make additional sense when viewed in the context of the search for a glowing pattern of unity. But only for a moment can the foliage be pushed aside. Existence is an infinite pointillism of detail. The French even say God is in the details, though Wat would add, so then is the devil.
'Liberated Words'
In Wat's background was the greatest of Jewish mystics, Isaac Luria, but another Luria had converted to Catholicism and became a canon of Vienna. Ultimate faith and the changing of faith ran in the family. His own father was a man strange about religion. Deeply immersed in the Kabbalah and modern philosophy, Wat's father made no attempt to instruct - that is to convert - his children from the paganism of youth to the Judaism of their fathers. Some of that Judaism seeped in, of course, and in many ways of one could not imagine a more perfectly Jewish type than
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