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Aleksander Smolar - My personal 'memento mori' (201/201)

506 views · Published 20 December 2018 · 3:07 · Indexed 5 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2018 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwlxPLurqAOCrabBgGrqLA7

Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]

TRANSCRIPT: Well, now for a few final sentences on what I began to say at the beginning, that your proposal to record this kind of monologue or story as you called it was in some sense shocking because at more or less the same time, I'd received several proposals from publishers to write this sort of long confession in the form of a book. In addition, my children had suddenly begun to take an interest and to record my story and so I thought to myself, this is 'a signum temporum' or rather a 'memento mori' in some sense. I mean, it was the moment in which this sort of thing should be done, as later it will be too late. When I was in prison, I was greatly influenced by several books and especially by one, Malcolm Lowry's 'Under the Volcano'. There's a character there and this sentence which – at the time I was still a very young man – has lodged in my memory: Hook is the younger brother of the main protagonist of the story, El Consulo, and I remember this sentence which seemed to run through the entire book, 'I'm 27 and I already know that I'm not all that wonderful'. I'm 50 years older than Hook was in that story, and I know that firstly, I'm aware of the limitations on what I was able to do, what I did and of the origin of a certain melancholy associated with this. I'm aware, too, of how little I'll still be able to do although I don't know how long my life will be. What I'm doing now through the Institute which I head is I'd like to set up something which already sort of exists, but I'd like to expand it much more so that it can be a place of lively debate, of reflection both political and social which will radiate and influence the thinking about Polish communal life. Right now as we're talking, we are in a critical moment and it's hard to say anything about the future. After 25 very successful years, we're seeing difficult days which are considerably less certain and are a source of sorrow. So you could say that this is the final stage – for now – of my engagement and attempt to influence reality within the limits of the possibilities open to me.

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