I’m reading the anti-communist Polish dissident poet Czeslaw Milosz’s great book The Captive Mind. He wrote it in 1951, to illuminate the mindset of intellectuals who assented to communist totalitarianism. I’ll have a lot more to say on it here soon, but I wanted to highlight this short passage, in which Milosz says that people have a natural craving for color and variety in life.

Reading it, I was reminded of being in Washington in 1988, before the Berlin Wall fell, and meeting a young Czech college student, who had defected recently with her parents. She was in one of the Smithsonian museums — it must have been the one dedicated to American history — and was mesmerized by a video presentation of American film musicals. I didn’t understand her intense fascination with the exhibition. She was so overwhelmed she could barely speak. She finally said to me, “The colors. The colors.” I then understood that she had been raised in the aesthetic hell of communism.

Anyway, here’s Milosz:

Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic. Such experiences are associated with works of art for only an insignificant number of individuals. The majority find pleasure of an aesthetic nature in the mere fact of their existence within the stream of life. In the cities, the eye meets colorful store displays, the diversity of human types. Looking at passers-by, one can guess from their faces the story of their lives. This movement of the imagination when a man is walking through a crowd has an erotic tinge; his emotions are very close to physiological sensations. He rejoices in dresses, in the flash of lights; while, for instance, Parisian markets with their heaps of vegetables and flowers, fish of every shape and hue, fruits, sides of meat dripping with every shade of red offer delights, he need not go seeking them in Dutch of Impressionist painting. He hears snatches of arias, the throbbing of motors mixed with the warble of birds, called greetings, laughter. His nose is assailed by changing odors: coffee, gasoline, oranges, ozone, roasting nuts, perfumes.

Those who have sung of the large cities have consecrated many pages to the description of this joyous immersion in the reservoir of universal life. The swimmer who trusts himself to the wave, and senses the immensity of the element that surrounds him lives through a like emotion. I am thinking of such great singers of the city as Balzac, Baudelaire, and Whitman. It would seem that the exciting and invigorating power of this participation in mass life springs from the feeling of potentiality, of constant unexpectedness, of a mystery one ever pursues.

Milosz says even country life “allows for aesthetic expression” in the rites of the Church, in folk festivals, country fairs, and so forth. Life in the Soviet empire destroyed all that, rendering everything grey, shabby, and stolid. Milosz writes:

The hunger for strangeness that is so great inside the Imperium should give the rulers pause; yet in all probability it does not, for they consider such longings derelicts from the past.

“The hunger for strangeness” — that’s a great phrase, isn’t it? It is interesting to observe how often the impulse to suppress it arises in human culture, always at the hands of a moralistic idea in power, an idea that distrusts sensuality as nothing more than a temptation away from the Truth. Let me clarify that I believe sensuality can be a temptation away from Truth … but it also can be an avenue towards Truth. In Orthodox Christian worship, the incense, the icons, the vestments, the singing — it’s all meant to reveal God to us, and to prepare our hearts to receive Him. The reason for feasting and fasting in traditional Christianity is to learn to rejoice in the gifts of God — of bread, of wine, of meat and fruit — while also learning not to be overcome by our pleasure in these created things.

Monks live under a far more ascetic rule, of course, but for the great majority of Christians, the cycles of feasting and fasting are necessary to live a balanced life. What’s more, we may learn to sublimate our base passions, and turn them into something beautiful and good. Anti-aesthetic creeds — I’m thinking of various forms of puritanical Christianity, of many forms of Islam, of communism — exercise a powerful hold on the moral imagination, but they inevitably call forth their extreme opposite. The human spirit cannot sustain itself by denying an instinct as basic as the craving for aesthetic pleasure.