Wanting to be elsewhere

On PR2, snippets from a conference on the history of Polish intelligentsia, most of it Marxist (they still take class seriously as an analytical concept there). (45 years of Marxist education has achieved a weird trick, produced a strange animal -- the Polish anticommunist Marxist).

(Verily, we shall not enter the promised land until the generation born in slavery has died).

It's very emotionally charged because the participants are theorizing about themselves: they are the intelligentsia -- lower middle to lower class in origin, urban, though not necessarily in origin, hard-working, upwardly mobile, on the make.

Their claim to be the continuation of Stanislaw Kostka seems strained to me. Marxistly speaking, they are not the same animal at all.

Problems of the 19th century are rehashed. What would have happened if the November Uprising had never taken place? National survival and independence are the main topic. Culture is a political tool.

My mind wonders off to another world, that of the paintings of Sakaki Hyakusen. This Japanese fellow was born in Nagoya and died in Kyoto, but his mind lived on the shores of the West Lake, which he repeatedly painted, taking his ideas from Chinese prints, poetry, and his own, fertile imagination.