Review Summary: beautifully nihilist
My mother is a Polish immigrant who came to the USA in the 80's, so evidently I have been exposed to a lot of the culture and history of the country. I vividly remember her cleaning the house, listening to Polish classics like Czesław Niemen, Chopin, and so many others. As a young American boy, I wasn't the most interested in my Polish heritage. I even have a fairly solid grasp on the language, but back then I was too busy worrying about whatever normal American middle-schoolers worry about rather than finding my own identity relating to my heritage.
But, as I got older, I got closer with my Mother again. I started reading more Polish literature, watching more movies, speaking the language more, completely enveloping myself in the history of the country of my mother's youth. Nothing stuck out to me more than Polish writers, especially the poets of the early to mid 20th century. There was a sort of linear nihilism present within this "Generation of Columbuses." A War-torn country, occupation by a brutal foreign force, death everywhere... and these young poets fought, and almost all subsequently died, before even reaching age 25.
This "inherent nihilism" I talk about is not one of immediate relation to every person who has had a negative or indifferent thought towards the world or humanity. Exclusivity is obviously absurd with something so seemingly natural in human behavior, but it is subjectively much more prominent in those who have seen and lived through the lands of their people becoming grounds for sinister human fallacies. This sort of thing lives on through generations.
You start to understand the exercises in futility, the meaningless apparatus in which we all strive to become something, at least it is more than nothing, right? The existential concepts experienced in our lives could be intuitively categorized through chapters, I, II, III, IV, etc., each representing different phases, outlooks, and the general stages of your mental being. The memories of your ancestors playing a part in such a forbidding outlook on our collective existence.
The mutual hopelessness of a common people tends to become broader in sharing this rampant nihilism with ones who haven't experienced loss and scrutiny. You begin to realize that maybe people en-masse are maggots to a disgusting exploitative facade that is so emptily called "modern society." There then becomes a laughable irony in the fact your art is so in depth and organic, even so seemingly textured in a world so surface level. When your ancestors before you wrote of a world so shallow, so devoid of humanity, and you start to read these things in depth, there is a subconscious connection. A shared understanding of the world around you, a depressingly self-aware outlook. A look into the struggles of Sisyphus and his boulder. A lesson of the fragility of existence.
When all is said and done, there is a particular keenness to the exercises of futility. That being, in all of the hopelessness and despair, you still set aside a certain eagerness to share your nihilism. To share your nihilism in such a well-executed, beautifully crafted way is reminiscent of your ancestors, you see. Because, for even all of the death and loss that surrounded them, they still needed to share their chapters of futility, as if their extended arms reached to pass their blindness onto others.
yeah, thats why it is kinda weird to me. there are a few allusions to the lyrics, especially the last sentence idk, but seriously thank you very much
