Holy Saturday a year later, and I am remembering my Easter
week in Sulęczyno with something of the vicarious rapture of the unsaved,
of proximity to joy and its nostalgia. All that church, candle light, candle
heat, the sizzle of wax and the eruption of incense, and the flinging of holy
water with long-tendriled mini-whisk brooms, followed by ritual and incessant
feasting. I miss it. Here, home, rereading Proust, I happen across lines such
as “Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries we
long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our true life than
the country in which we may happen to be.” [298] Proust reads actually like a
Pole, melancholy, graceful, capricious, virtuoso, just as he described Chopin.
So, while I’m far away, reading French and Russian novelists, they and the
season return me to Poland and the richer reality of memory, our true life.
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| Swieconka: Easter basket blessed at Mass |
I’ve returned as well to the Constitution of this, the Third
Republic of Poland, now seventeen years old this month, for extended study. A
curious document at first glance, high-minded, loquacious, contradictory,
assertive, and yet a little silly in spots, as constitutions and teenagers are
wont to be. I note that the U.S. Constitution, which serves as a model of sorts
for western democracies, rather crisply delineates Seven Articles. In the
Polish Constitution, there are two hundred and forty-three. Now, in all
fairness, we’ve added Twenty-Seven Amendments over time, including one abolishing
slavery (XIII)—only vaguely alluded to in the main body of the Supreme Document—so it’s not as if the U.S. Constitution got it perfect and spoke to everything it needed to speak to; and no doubt,
the world and governance have gotten more complex since 1787, but two hundred
and forty-three articles seems like a lot. Especially when more than one of
them reads like Article 81: “The rights specified in Article 65, paras. 4 and
5, Article 66, Article 69, Article 71 and Articles 74-76, may be asserted
subject to limitations specified by statute.” Not the most elegant of executive
prose. There is a story to this Constitution and to each of its articles,
I’m sure, and I hope I won’t get to them all, but enough of them to understand
the foundations of its contemporary political culture, its basic rules for
civic life, which is but occasionally ridiculous—everywhere.
