Alexander Lobok read for us the book by Grigory Pomerants «Notes of the Ugly Duckling».
“It was in beautiful and harmonious ancient Greece that philosophy was born out of surprise. In the history of the twentieth century, philosophy is born on the existential border with hell — from an effort to overcome the opening horror and nightmare.
Grigory Pomerants’ book is not a memoir in the usual sense of the word. This is the story of the birth, acquisition and cultivation of inner freedom as the only thing that truly gives strength and the ability to live. To live without looking back at the abomination and inconsistency of the conditions in which we find ourselves placed by the circumstances of time and fate.
Notes of the Ugly Duckling is, of course, a book of spiritual power. Moreover, such a force that is not connected with any spirituality drawn from outside. This is a force that is born by the person himself from within himself, and is not at all acquired (as many people think) from somewhere outside. And it is born in the experience of the «ugly duckling» — the experience of an internal dramatic mismatch with the conditions and rules accepted in the outside world.
The main, core idea of the book is that a person grows out of the conditions in which he is doomed to external insignificance. But this does not happen automatically: whether it grows or not depends only on the person himself. And, in particular, from his efforts and ability to responsibly peer into himself. From his ability to create himself from his «irregularities», from discrepancies with the world, with other people. This is the true path. The story of Pomeranets is an experience of creating oneself for the first time, from nothing: I am not inscribed in the environment from the very beginning, not bound by its settings — and that is why I am able to be born and become myself.
Pomeranz’s autobiography is a life story that unfolds not linearly, not physically sequentially, but metaphysically. As a result, a fundamentally non-Euclidean space of memories is born, held by some kind of cross-cutting verticals of meanings. The logic of the book is the logic of turns, when thinking “open to the abyss” treads some paths again and again and repeatedly returns to the same key situations.
This is amazing, but almost all the events, meetings that Pomeranz writes about are points of existential choice for him, that is, the ultimate personal, human self-determination — philosophical, ethical, aesthetic. This is a book of off-scale existential density.
Life as irregularity and non-coincidence. Life as an existential choice. Life as an acquisition of the spirit and an inner achievement. In my opinion, these are the reference points of genuine human existence in any era.