Epilogue to Rob Reimen’s book, Nobility of Spirit:

In an old European city, the poet, nintety years old and shackled to his bed but with a mind that is still clear, hears that his dearest woman friend has died. Czeslaw Milosz writes:

What did I learn from Jeanne Hersch?

1. That reason is a great gift from God and one should trust in its capacity to know the world.

2. That they were mistaken who undermined our confidence in reason by enumerating its determinants: class struggle, libido, the will to power.

3. That we should be aware of being imprisoned in our perceptions, but should not therefore reduce reality to dreams, illusions, produced by mind.

4. That truthfulness is a proof of freedom and falsehood is typical slavery.

5. That the appropriate attitude in the face of existence is reverence, and this is why one should avoid the company of those who debase it through sarcasm and who praise nothingness.

6. That, even if this should lead to an accusation of arrogance, intellectual life governs itself by the rule of a strict hierarchy.

7. That the addiction of the twentieth-century intellectuals is le baratin—chatter devoid of responsibility.

8. That in the hierarchy of human activities art shall be placed higher than philosophy but that a bad philosophy can corrupt art.

9. That there is objective truth; namely, out of two conflicting statements one is true, the other false, except in the cases when contradiction is legitimate.

10. That quite independently of the fate of natural religions one should preserve a “philosophical faith,” i.e., the belief in transcendence as an important ingredient of our humanity.

11. That time condemns to oblivion only these works of hands and minds that do not help, century after century, to build the great house of civilization.

12. That in our own lives we should not despair because of errors and sins, for the past is not closed, it receives the meaning from our present actions.