Gombrowicz - Polish Literature

Before his writing career, as a judge's intern in Warsaw

I also observed the upper spheres called upon to pass judgment on the lower ones - the judges, prosecutors, lawyers.  I liked the judges infinitely more than the lawyers, whom I found repugnant - as I do to this day - for their pretentiousness, their rhetoric, their oratorical maneuvers, for all their legal talk, which strains toward culture, humanism, and philosophy, while at root they're usually far from any kind of mastery of these domains.  In court it became clear that their studies of the law had given them neither the general education of which they were so proud, nor good manners in the deeper, humanistic sense of the phrase.  And their confrontation with human misery left much to be desired...


Polish Memories