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Meditations: "Measure"

Jerzy Narbutt


A human being seldom measures up to the cause in the name of which he acts: causes tend to be greater than individualhuman beings. There have been few Krzysztof Baczyńskis in history.

But true dedication to a great cause is the most reliable measure of human greatness. There are people who do not understand this. Henryk Sienkiewicz did understand. That is why he occasionally drew his characters with a coarse pen, unmindful of the possibility that Jerzy Andrzejewski would call them “heroic fools.” That is why I admire Sienkiewicz’s intelligence and remain indifferent to the fact that in certain circles, one can earn a reputation for high intelligence by denigrating Sienkiewicz’s.

Krzysztof Baczyński (1924-1944), an extraordinarily talented Polish poet who died in the 1944 Warsaw Rising.

Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916), a Nobel-winning Polish novelist, author of Quo Vadis and With Fire and Sword.

Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909-1983), a Polish novelist who accommodated himself to the conditions in Soviet-occupied Poland after the Second World War. He wrote Ashes and Diamonds (1946).

 


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