As a respite from the annual carnage in Długosz’s
Roczniki, I turned to Zbigniew
Herbert’s collected prose. He wrote informedly and well about the classics,
French cathedral architecture, painting and painters, especially of the
Renaissance—Piero della Francesca. But for some reason—an ethnic catastrophist
streak among Poles?—he recounts a tale of the Inquisition, of Inquisitors
getting their just deserts, martyrdom: “Though it is difficult to feel sympathy
for an institution called the Inquisition, one has to respect the courage of
people who enter unarmed a place known as a hotbed of heresy, in a de facto
state of war…. When the door breaks down under the blows of axes, the friars
kneel on the floor and begin to sing Salve
Regina. The slaughter is full of fury and cruelty. Sources tell us that the
broken skull of Guillaume Arnaud was used as a drinking cup by his murderer.”
(122) I much prefer to live in an age when the bleached bones of our enemies
are not considered suitable for stemware.
On a lighter note, and one having nothing vaguely to do with
Polish sensibility, or do I repeat myself, I am happy to report under this
August blue moon, the fourth full moon of a season, that Dino’s boat, the Lua, lost on the 17th of
June, drifted a hundred something miles almost due east, been recovered, towed
to the west coast of Ireland by “a realy [sic] nice gentleman,” and secured in
a shipyard for repairs. He hopes to sail her home to the Azores next summer. May
God bless the realy nice.
