From his point of view, to be seen always in political terms was particularly ironic because his argument with Marxism, indeed with the modern world, was that it had pinned the wrong kind of hope on politics. He had been, as he records in his autobiography, attracted to Marxism as a young man not so much because of its millenarian dream, but because it was based on the idea that the world was made not out of freedom, but out of necessity and power. In the end, this view of the world, though it had the look of frank realism, seemed to a mind like his, steeped in both Christianity and Polish Romanticism, servile, and its promise of some realm of absolute justice seemed a failure of the religious imagination. Or, to say it another way, it valued becoming more than it valued being. He believed that justice was a continuous struggle in human societies, not an absolute that the world was evolving toward. And therefore he didn’t think it was the end of history that mattered or its processes, but its individual moments. It was being, the very fact of the existence of things, that always seemed to him to be mysterious, to be the place where the meaning of existence—mute, perhaps, specific beyond the power of language, singular, not quite graspable—lay.