Category: Philosophy, Thoughts, and Musings

The Two Carriages: A Meditation on Kajetan Sołtyk

Detail of the sarcophagus relief, funerary monument of Bishop Kajetan Ignacy Sołtyk (1715-1788), Chapel of the Holy Cross, Wawel Cathedral, Kraków. The relief depicts Sołtyk’s deportation by Russian troops to Kaługa, 1767. Photograph: S. Michta, from Studia Waweliana, vol. 1, 1992, p. 86.

In the Holy Cross Chapel of the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków stands the funerary monument of Kajetan Ignacy Sołtyk, sixty-seventh Bishop of Kraków — commissioned by his nephew Michał in 1790, the year of Poland’s second partition. On the face of the sarcophagus, rendered in low relief, a carriage moves under cavalry escort along a road that leads, though the stone does not say so, to Kaługa, in the Russian interior. The year was 1767. Sołtyk had been seized by Russian troops by order of the Russian ambassador for opposing Russia’s political and religious program for the Commonwealth during the Sejm, bundled into a carriage, and driven east — a political abduction so brazen that it became, in the decades following, one of the founding outrages of Polish martyrological memory. He would not return for five years.

The monument transforms that enforced journey into the central scene of a man’s significance: not his episcopate, not his theology, not his political career, but the moment he was taken away against his will and transformed into a patriot-martyr — a transformation his later years, marked by mental collapse and withdrawal from public life, would do nothing to complicate in the popular memory.

That is one carriage.

There is another, less well-known but preserved in prose.

The Entry of Kajetan Sołtyk, Bishop of Kraków, Prince of Siewierz, into Kraków Castle to the Cathedral Church in the year 1759 (c.1814) by Michał Stachowicz (1768–1825).

The memoirist Jędrzej Kitowicz, describing the ceremonial processions that opened each session of the Sejm — the king riding from his palace to the Sejm, flanked by the ranked carriages of senators and deputies, each equipage expressing by the number of its liveried attendants the precise degree of its owner’s dignity — notes that the most elaborate display permitted by custom consisted of twelve lackeys and six haiduks (the tall liveried footmen whose Hungarian-style dress and ceremonial bearing made them among the most visible markers of aristocratic magnificence), a number not exceeded even by the king himself. In fact it was exceeded by one participant only. Kajetan Sołtyk, in the first year of his episcopate at Kraków, appeared in the procession of 1760 with twenty-four lackeys, twelve haiduks, and four pages. Already in his second year, Kitowicz adds with characteristic dryness, he had reduced this magnificent display to conventional proportions.

Two carriages, then. One at the height of his career, one at its nadir. One the expression of an ambition so consuming it overreached even the sovereign’s ceremonial precedence; the other the instrument of a foreign power’s contempt for Polish sovereignty and ecclesiastical dignity. In both, the bishop is being carried — not walking of his own volition, not the autonomous agent of his own movement, but the passenger of forces that exceed his will. In 1760 those forces are internal: a visceral hunger for visibility, for precedence, for recognition. In 1767 they are external and violent. But the structural resemblance is uncanny and instructive. He is always at the center of an attended vehicle. What changes is not the form, but only the hand that commands the escort.

Kitowicz does not moralize. He gives you the numbers — twenty-four, twelve, four — and then simply notes, almost in passing, the reduction that followed. Whether the correction came from rebuke or recognition of excess, the record does not say. It is enough that the excess was seen and then moderated and not repeated.

What the monument suppresses, and what Kitowicz preserves, is that earlier carriage: the one that moved through Warsaw under twenty-four lackeys, announcing to every observer that the newly installed Bishop of Kraków had arrived and was to be noticed above all others, including the king. Michał Sołtyk knew the record. He chose which carriage to put on the sarcophagus.

The choice, motivated by familial piety and political calculation, was not wrong — or not simply wrong, though neither was it uncontested. Sołtyk’s reputation has never settled into a single image. Those who remembered him as a patriot and victim were matched, even in his own lifetime, by those who remembered him as a man whose turbulent ambitions had done as much to destabilize the Republic as the foreign powers that preyed upon it. The martyrological image the monument proposes is one reading of the man — a powerful reading, and one that history has repeatedly ratified — but it is a reading, not a verdict. What it identifies correctly is the hinge. The deportation to Kaługa became the organizing fact of his significance. The twenty-four lackeys made him conspicuous for a season; the cavalry escort made his memory, his conspicuousness, permanent.

There is a certain grammar to this, whether one chooses to call it providential or merely historical. The force that humiliated him accomplished what his own will had sought, and failed, to secure: an uncontested image of magnitude, carried not along the Kraków Road in Warsaw but forward into a posterity that required, as Poland required, its martyrs. Sołtyk, a Catholic bishop and political operator with a pronounced taste for the theatrical and excess, would not have found the role uncongenial. The monument does not lie, exactly. It chooses. It fixes upon the carriage that tells the truth it prefers and lets the other fall away—not into oblivion, but into the keeping of a memoirist who recorded what he saw, and of those who return to it.

Sources

The fullest current scholarship on Sołtyk’s funerary monument and the attribution of its design to Father Sebastian Sierakowski draws on Joanna Daranowska-Łukaszewska, “Kto jest autorem nagrobka biskupa Kajetana Sołtyka w katedrze na Wawelu?” (Studia Waweliana, vol. 1, 1992). The account of the Sejm processions and Sołtyk’s ceremonial display is drawn from Jędrzej Kitowicz, Opis obyczajów za panowania Augusta III (Description of Customs in the Reign of Augustus III). Background on Sołtyk’s seizure and deportation draws on Kazimierz Rudnicki, Biskup Kajetan Sołtyk (Kraków, 1906), and on the archival and biographical materials assembled in the course of the author’s ongoing work on a biography of the bishop.

Thinking new things every day

On Democritus and the Practice of Intellectual Renewal

Time seems to pass with increasing alacrity as age advances, perhaps because the days are rarely idle. This month alone has been filled with reading—books, articles, essays, plays, and poems—alongside listening to unfamiliar musical compositions, writing both essays and poems, exploring sculpture, art, and artists to whom I had not earlier been exposed, and even watching a film or two new to me. In parallel, several projects occupy my attention, some practicable, others less so.

Among the works read recently, as part of a larger and deliberately sustained program of reading, was The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus (Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary) by C. C. W. Taylor. The terrain was at once familiar and difficult—as all serious thought invariably is. Yet one fragment, attributed to Democritus, stood out precisely because of its simplicity. Fragment D3, rendered in Greek as νέα ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ φρονῶντες and translated as “Thinking new things every day,” resonated with unexpected force.

The maxim requires little exegesis. It does not strain toward profundity, nor does it announce itself with philosophical grandeur. And yet it gestures toward a way of living that is both demanding and humane. To think new things each day is not merely to accumulate novelty, but to cultivate receptivity: to ensure that the mind does not calcify, that attention remains alert, that experience continues to provoke reflection.

One might imagine how much more open, thoughtful, and richly inhabited our lives would be if we deliberately set aside even a small portion of each day—ten minutes, perhaps, or an hour, as circumstances allow—to encounter something new. Whether through reading, art, music, film, playfulness, or creative expression of one’s own, the discipline of daily intellectual renewal is no small thing. It is, in the Democritean sense, a commitment not merely to activity, but to the practice of vitality of mind itself.

Autumnal Note for October 28, 2025

Just returned from a brief errand. As I drove east along Lake Avenue in Lakewood, the autumn foliage was at its radiant peak, a kaleidoscope of living color, and the mid-morning sun—at 10:50—displayed it to full advantage. Gemstones would be embarrassed, and rainbows would blush.

Upon reaching the Lakewood–Cleveland border, it was clear the colors were not as vivid. So moved was I by the brilliance I had just witnessed that I immediately turned back so that I could trace the same three-mile eastward path once more, simply to behold again the wonder of dancing color, of light and leaves. It was a small diversion of time and effort that gladdened the heart, soothed the soul, and reminded me how splendiferous autumn can be—more wondrous than any peacock’s fan of tail could ever hope to be.

On the Em Dash

The em dash—now ever present in my writing—was, for the better part of my life, a non-entity. For several obvious reasons.

First, though it may have appeared in my handwritten script, I scarcely distinguished it from an ordinary dash or hyphen; the length of line between words was inconsequential in my already indecipherable and increasingly illegible hand. In truth, I long remained unaware of its proper name, or of the distinctions of nomenclature that punctuation ascribes to the several lengths of line between words.

Second, my earliest years of composition were spent at the typewriter. There, whether composing at the typewriter or transcribing handwritten script at the typewriter for submission and review, I knew only the dash—or the double dash—a generally unattractive contrivance, with space-dash-space between words when some pause seemed warranted. Better, I thought, a semicolon, a colon, or perhaps parenthetical for the offset thought.

And then came my first decades at the computer, where a stilted admixture of bureaucratic and legalistic form constrained me: such mandated style allowed no room for such expressive gestures. The dash—any dash—was a rarity in the acceptable prose of the office.

But in retirement, in the rediscovery of prose and poetry and possibility, I learned how easily the ungainly dash could be replaced by its elegant cousin—the em dash. And so I was converted: from endless parentheticals, unsightly space-dash-space, and other intrusive devices, to this versatile and dashing stroke. Poets and novelists know its power—and so, it seems, to the consternation of creative writers everywhere, does artificial intelligence.

The Cooling of the Flame: On the Intellectualization of Emotion from Petrarch to the Modern Mind

Amor, che ‘ncende il cor d’ardente zelo,
di gelata paura il tèn constretto,
et qual sia più, fa dubbio a l’intelletto,
la speranza o ‘l temor, la fiamma o ‘l gielo.

Love that lights ardent zeal in the heart,
constrains it also with an icy fear,
and leaves the mind uncertain which is greater,
the hope or the fear, the flame or the frost.
— Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere 182

I. The Divided Heart

Few poets have so perfectly distilled the contradictory essence of love as Petrarch. In four lines, he sets the human heart ablaze and in the same breath subdues it with frost. Love, that “ardent zeal,” becomes inseparable from the chill of fear; the intellect, summoned to arbitrate between hope and terror, finds itself immobilized in doubt. The flame illuminates even as it freezes.

The quatrain serves not merely as an emblem of courtly love but as a mirror of the reflective soul—the soul that, once conscious of its passion, cannot help but analyze it. Every act of self-awareness introduces distance; every act of comprehension tempers immediacy. To understand what one feels is already to stand outside the feeling. Thus, the Petrarchan heart is forever divided: inflamed by emotion, yet cooled by the very intellect that seeks to grasp it.

12 ⁄ 13 Download this file Large (664×1080 px) Download View in browser Attribution You need to attribute the author Plain HTML By Wikibusters - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=119935288 By Wikibusters - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=119935288​ Copy More details Statue of Petrarch on the Uffizi Palace, in Florence
Statue of Petrarch on the Uffizi Palace, in Florence

II. Petrarch’s Paradox—Flame and Frost

In Canzoniere 182, Amore is no mere sentiment but a force of cosmic ambivalence—a sacred fire that binds as much as it liberates. The heart, seized by ardente zelo, is at once inspired and constrained by gelata paura; passion and dread are inseparable twins. But what gives the poem its enduring power is the final turn: fa dubbio a l’intelletto—it makes the intellect uncertain.

This uncertainty is not simple indecision; it is the very mechanism by which passion becomes reflection. The lover’s flame, examined, begins to cool—and that cooling assumes distinct forms.

First, love cools by comprehension. The instant it is understood, passion becomes object rather than subject. The flame is enclosed in glass: it still glows, but it no longer burns.

Second, love cools by doubt of itself. Reflection turns inward, questioning its own authenticity: Is this love true, or merely imagined? In this moment, feeling erodes under the acid of self-consciousness.

Third, love cools by doubt of the beloved. The intellect, unable to sustain idealization, wonders whether the object of devotion merits such intensity. The beloved becomes an emblem—not a person of flesh and breath, but a mirror of perfection that no reality can equal.

Fourth, love cools by doubt of the lover’s worthiness. The heart fears it is unworthy of its own longing. Humility becomes paralysis, and passion folds inward upon itself.

These four modes of cooling form the architecture of Petrarch’s inner world—the endless oscillation between fervor and fear, adoration and self-doubt. He writes not to resolve this tension but to dwell within it. Each sonnet is a chamber where flame and frost coexist, where thought is both confessor and executioner of feeling.

III. Dante and the Alchemy of the Intellect

Dante offers a luminous counterpoint. In La Vita Nuova and the Paradiso, intellect and love are not adversaries but allies; the mind becomes the means by which love ascends. L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle—the love that moves the sun and the other stars—does not cool but sanctifies. In Dante, the intellect transforms passion into vision—the earthly beloved into divine wisdom. The flame does not die; it becomes light.

Consider the climactic moment of Paradiso XXXIII, where Dante’s vision finally encompasses the divine mystery. His intellect, far from diminishing his love, becomes the very instrument of its perfection. He describes how his desire and will are turned like a wheel by the love that moves the sun and the other stars. Here, understanding completes rather than constrains. The mind does not freeze the heart; it liberates it into comprehension of the Eternal. Beatrice herself, who began as an earthly beloved, becomes through the intellect’s mediation a guide to the Beatific Vision. Her smile, growing ever brighter as they ascend through the spheres of Paradise, finally becomes too radiant for mortal sight—not because love has cooled, but because it has been refined into pure illumination.

Petrarch inherits Dante’s vocabulary but not his cosmos. His world is one step further from heaven, one degree cooler. Where Dante’s intellect completes love by raising it to the eternal, Petrarch’s intellect contains it, interrogates it, doubts it. He lives in the afterglow of revelation—the warmth still present, but the fire withdrawn. As the Paradiso closes, Dante’s vision resolves into the final harmony of understanding and desire—l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle—the line that unites intellect and love in a single act of divine motion. Petrarch cannot reach this synthesis. His flame flickers in the middle distance, neither extinguished nor transcendent.

IV. The Modern Inheritance—Reflection and Alienation

From Petrarch descends the long lineage of reflective melancholy that characterizes the modern mind. His was the first great experiment in self-conscious passion—the attempt to inhabit feeling and analyze it at once. After him, love and thought could no longer coexist in innocence; the very act of awareness altered the nature of what was felt.

Montaigne and the Essay of the Self

Montaigne inherits this disposition and turns it into method. In his Essais, feeling is no longer confessed in the lyric key but dissected in the prose of observation. The heart becomes a field for inquiry, and what was once sung becomes tested, weighed, compared. It is telling that Montaigne quotes Petrarch approvingly: “He who can say how he burns with love, has little fire.” (Chi può dir com’ egli arde, è in picciol fuoco, Canzoniere 137). The aphorism might well serve as Montaigne’s motto, for he, too, knows that passion explained is passion already cooling.

His genial skepticism marks the first full tempering of Petrarch’s flame: affection survives, but only as reflection. The essay replaces the sonnet as the vessel of interior life; emotion, distilled into thought, becomes the study of itself. In Montaigne, we see the completion of a transformation begun in Petrarch—the lover becomes the anatomist of his own heart, and the page becomes not a transcript of feeling but a laboratory for its examination. The warmth of passion is not extinguished but transmuted into the steady light of self-knowledge.

Wordsworth and Emotion Recollected

Wordsworth, centuries later, restores emotion to poetry, yet only by containing it within the frame of recollection. His famous dictum—”emotion recollected in tranquillity”—is itself a Petrarchan paradox, though less tormented. He admits that to write of passion is to have already survived it. The poet stands at a contemplative distance from his own fervor, translating immediacy into memory, fire into afterglow. What once consumed now instructs.

In the Prelude (XII), Wordsworth describes the “spots of time” that preserve the intensity of past experience, yet the very act of preservation requires temporal remove. The flame of immediate experience has cooled into the steady glow of retrospective understanding. Wordsworth does not lament this cooling as loss; rather, he discovers in it a new kind of beauty—the beauty of consciousness reflecting upon its own depths.

Eliot and the Fragments of Feeling

By the time we reach T.S. Eliot, the process is complete. In The Waste Land, the flame is nearly ash. His lines of “memory and desire” register not passion itself but its echo—reverberations in a chamber long since emptied of direct experience. Emotion is mediated through quotation, irony, and allusion; the self no longer speaks but curates its fragments.

Consider the hyacinth girl passage, where memory itself fails to sustain emotion: “I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing.” The speaker recalls a moment that should have been transcendent—arms full of flowers, hair wet—but the recollection brings only paralysis, a kind of death-in-life. Even memory cannot resurrect the feeling; it can only gesture toward its absence. The modern condition is not the absence of feeling but its overexposure, its reduction to artifact. The poem becomes the museum of emotion, its vitrines polished and sterile. Where Petrarch’s flame still flickered with real heat, and Wordsworth’s embers still glowed warm, Eliot presents us with the cold remains—fragments shored against ruins. Where Petrarch doubts his own worthiness to feel, Eliot doubts feeling itself. The circle has closed; intellect now governs even absence.

The Progressive Abstraction

Between Montaigne’s self-observation, Wordsworth’s recollected emotion, and Eliot’s fractured memory, one can trace the progressive abstraction of the human heart. Each represents a further remove from Petrarch’s immediacy: what began as a dialogue between love and intellect becomes a monologue of intellect about love. The warmth remains, but it is remembered warmth—the lingering heat of stones long after the fire has gone out.

And yet, in each of these figures, the Petrarchan spark persists. Montaigne’s curiosity, Wordsworth’s reverence for inward life, Eliot’s yearning for spiritual coherence—all descend from that first poet who dared to make consciousness itself his subject. The flame may cool, but its light passes on, refracted through centuries of minds still haunted by the desire to feel purely and the impossibility of doing so once thought begins.

V. The Cooling of the Flame—A Personal Reflection

It is impossible, for some temperaments, to escape this inheritance. Emotion arises, and almost immediately the mind begins to interpret it—weighing, contextualizing, seeking its meaning. In doing so, it drains the warmth from the moment even as it preserves it in memory.

To intellectualize emotion is to betray and to honor it at once. The betrayal lies in the loss of immediacy; the honor lies in the act of remembrance. What the heart cannot sustain, the mind attempts to eternalize. The flame cools into an image—but in that cooling, it endures.

Perhaps the intellect is not the enemy of passion but its afterlife. Every poem, every meditation, every recollection is a small resurrection of a feeling that once burned uncontrollably. The fire itself is gone, but its light remains, steady now, capable of illuminating others.

This is the paradox Petrarch teaches: that the lover who cannot stop thinking destroys the ecstasy of love but gains, in its place, the wisdom of love. To understand one’s passion is to lose it; yet without understanding, it would pass unnoticed, leaving no trace but ashes.

VI. The Light of the Ashes

Petrarch’s quatrain ends in uncertainty, but not in despair. His is not the extinguished flame, but the tempered one. Love and fear, hope and doubt, flame and frost—these are not enemies but necessary contraries. The human soul, poised between ardor and intellect, must learn to bear the tension rather than resolve it.

In the end, intellect does not annihilate feeling; it refines it. The cooled flame still gives light. That light—pale but enduring—is the radiance of thought born from passion, the steady glow of what once burned brightly.

We live by such embers. To love is to burn; to remember is to cool; to think is to preserve. Between these three acts, the heart makes its pilgrimage from fire to frost to flame again—each transformation both loss and grace.