I understand how males in exile feed on desires of hope.
—Aeschylus, Prometheus Sure
Beavers had been hunted to close extinction in Europe by mid-century, however in America, they thrived. For the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, they might have held an apparent fascination. They’re muscular animals; they’ll carry their very own substantial weight when constructing a lodge, which might complete three tons. And although they’re, to all appearances, dumpy, heavy rodents, once they plunge into water, they’re as glossy as otters. One in all these odd creatures moved Miłosz to make maybe essentially the most important determination of his life, although he would see that solely on reflection. He would write about it years later in France—however he was removed from Paris on that day, on one early winter morning earlier than daybreak within the winter of 1948-49.
The love and reverence many Californians really feel for the Pacific is, in a lot of the world, directed in direction of rivers. Definitely, it was so with Miłosz. He had been drawn to rivers since his childhood, on the Niewiaża river, in Lithuania’s Šeteniai, and now he was unimaginably far-off, within the land the place natura dominated supreme. The Pacific Ocean that was his destined dwelling was terrifying and alien, however this river was manageable.
Miłosz was ready to catch sight of the beavers. He paddled a rowboat in a Pennsylvania river earlier than daybreak. He was cautious; any slight noise would possibly startle the creatures. He contemplated the disappearance of the world of esse, the world of essences and everlasting truths, and he thought-about leaping a much bigger ship than the small boat he was rowing—briefly, defecting from the Stalinist authorities of Poland.
He was not alone. He would later write that the overwhelming majority of diplomats noticed their presence in America as an opportunity to defect—only some returned to Poland. The development accelerated as Stalin consolidated energy. Aside from Miłosz, who characteristically resisted. He mentioned, “To return to Stalinist Poland would have been essentially the most blatant nonsense. And but, although it sounds ridiculous to say this, good little Czeslaw merely couldn’t resign his loyalty.”[1]
To go or to remain? His spouse Janka was terrified by Europe’s instability and the encroaching communism creeping westward. She was urging, begging him to remain within the U.S. The playwright Thornton Wilder, a protector and good friend to the household, promised to set him up on a farm the place he may keep and write poems—the world of nature, of esse, had at all times been a lure for him. Such a transfer would after all minimize him off from his past love, his Mom Tongue.
The Chilly Struggle was already taking form, and the Miłosz household was underneath suspicion and commentary from either side. His son Anthony Miłosz advised me, “We had been all destined for examination. We had been continually watched, spied upon. You simply felt it.” Individuals who had “no enterprise figuring out one thing about you,” nonetheless knew. Miłosz’s spouse Janka turned fatally in poor health throughout these years. His youthful son would go mad. In line with Anthony, Peter’s paranoia “had a component of this spying,” including “It’s honest to say it drove him to madness.”
Miłosz was tormented. He drove to Mercer Avenue in Princeton, New Jersey, to speak to Albert Einstein, an advisor, good friend, and maybe a father determine as effectively. He wished the sensible man’s phrases. His dilemma: to defect was to make a long-lasting break together with his Mom Tongue and dwell in an alien land, a tragedy for a poet. To stick with Poland was to danger censorship and arrest. Probably extra. However the genius physicist who had left the more and more harmful Europe for America in 1933 advised the Polish poet that the lifetime of exile was arduous, and suggested him, “You had higher follow your nation.” And so he did. Till he couldn’t. And that may be a story in itself.
New Poetry for a New World
The postwar world was coalescing, transferring nationwide borders and shifting populations, however a smaller and less-heralded occasion modified the world otherwise. It was the yr that Ocalenie [Salvation] was revealed at struggle’s finish; Miłosz’s outstanding poetry assortment introduced the wind of change with it, contemplating the struggle, the Holocaust, and as at all times, his sense of surprise on the world. In 2024, the Polish world celebrated the e book’s eightieth birthday, with a brand-new version from Znak Publishers. Miłosz was already an vital younger poet by the struggle’s finish, however this e book marks the second he turned an excellent one. A welter of landmark poems which have stayed in public reminiscence ever since burst upon the world with its publication: “Encounter,” “Campo dei Fiori,” “A Poor Christian Seems on the Ghetto,” the poems of “The World” sequence, amongst them.
And naturally, the devastating poem from 1945, “Dedication,” a principled and heartrending cry to a younger good friend who was killed on the ruins of a demolished Warsaw, and a protection of the poet’s mission:
What’s poetry which doesn’t save
Nations or individuals?
A connivance with official lies,
A music of drunkards whose throats will probably be minimize in a second,
Readings for sophomore ladies.
That I wished good poetry with out figuring out it,
That I found, late, its salutary purpose,
On this and solely this I discover salvation.
( . . . the final phrase in Polish, after all, repeats the e book’s title, ocalenie.)
For Miłosz, Ocalenie is a self-defining assertion, echoing the full-throated lamentation of the wieszcz, a distinctly Polish conception of the poet as prophet, who can communicate for his time, who brings the tribe collectively and defines its future. He was following within the massive footsteps of Polish poets going all the best way again to Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s Ur-poet who declared “Poland is the Christ of the nations,” a prophesy of redemption and triumph that figured within the election of a Polish pope in 1978 and the Solidarity motion of the Nineteen Eighties. Others enriched this deeply Polish pressure—Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, Cyprian Norwid, and Stanisław Wyspiański. However this poem was written within the aftermath of some of the murderous wars in historical past—salvation was not solely a religious query, however a matter of survival.
Ocalenie is a really rigorously composed e book—extra so than, say, Eliot’s Wasteland. But comparatively little has been mentioned about it, given its significance in Miłosz’s oeuvre and its significance to world literature. It was republished for the primary time in 2024. That is essential.
Miłosz would drop the oracular tone in America, the place it was retro to strike such a pose; to an American ear it sounds pretentious and bombastic. Maybe that’s the reason the English version of Ocalenie strikes the dedication to the again of the amount—an odd placement for a dedication, however a proper selection for the instances. He was in America now, and had discovered that the oracular tone was considered as pompous, typically even comically so, towards the stripped down, get-to-the-point American vernacular.
There are numerous sorts of ocalenie and its transferal into English is hard, a temper and a motion, a stance of resistance. The 1945 e book that ushered in postwar Poland had many meanings. The primary translators of the 1973 American version with Seabury Press known as it Rescue. Nevertheless, Miłosz’s first translator into English, the Canadian diplomat and Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott, scoffed on the translation. “Rescue” he mentioned, “is whenever you get a cat down from a tree.” “Ocalenie” has extra religious intimations; a better translation is “Salvation.” So it might not be an excessive amount of of a attain to think about ocalenie within the wider sense. It was a turning level—in a brand new period, in a brand new world.
1945 can be vital in yet one more means: Miłosz was appointed cultural attaché for the Polish authorities, serving first in New York Metropolis after which Washington. It was a fortunate place that allowed him the liberty to journey and the possibility to familiarize himself with the nation that was already one possibility for his future . . . however he was at all times underneath authorities eye, at all times noticed by spies.
***
Following his 1951 defection from Communist Poland, Miłosz would dwell 4 a long time of his life in exile, relying on the way you rely them. His son Anthony satirically described the Polish perspective of what occurred to his father this fashion: “He was an vital younger poet, then one thing dangerous occurred, he went to America and sulked for some time, after which he lastly got here again to all of you,” that’s, he lastly was in a position to rejoin the Polish individuals, starting within the Nineteen Eighties.
There was a lot extra to it than that, nevertheless, as Anthony Miłosz knew. The “dangerous” factor that occurred was a world struggle, leaving half of Europe underneath the Soviet thumb—a brutal ordeal for the Polish individuals. He lastly returned to Poland full-time in 2000, after seven years commuting between Berkeley and Poland, and he acquired an condominium within the metropolis—however the American years are just about a lacuna for Poles, although he lived extra of his life in america than anyplace else. He produced a miraculous tsunami of poetry, essays, and novels throughout his American years. When he was knowledgeable of his 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, he greeted reporters on his doorstep in Berkeley, not Kraków.
It has been greater than twenty years since his dying in 2004. He advised me in 2000: “It appears to me each poet after dying goes by way of a purgatory, so to say. So, he should undergo that second of revision after dying.”
We’re overdue for a revival and right here’s why: Every new e book about Miłosz deepens our humanity and offers one other weapon within the poet’s lifelong struggle of reminiscence towards oblivion, his rejection of narrow-mindedness, ignorance, and tribalism. The capaciousness of his thoughts, the depth of his understanding, recommends him to the widest doable readership. Two latest books have make clear his American years: Peter Dale Scott has revealed an erudite and complete research, Ecstatic Pessimist: Czeslaw Miłosz, Poet of Disaster and Hope, a document of the collaboration that started in 1960; after which there may be mine: Czesław Miłosz: A California Life, in 2021. I’m grateful for Znak making a Polish version of the e book, as I had at all times envisioned it might have.
An Ink-stained Kitchen Desk in Paris
I mentioned that every new e book deepens our humanity and is a weapon within the struggle of reminiscence and oblivion; I ought to say that the identical is on a funds scale with every poem; every is sort of a little bomb exploding our expectations and clichés. I wish to discuss a type of poems now. The poem was written through the condensed and tormented time we have now been contemplating—the time of the beavers, the time of high-risk, irreversible choices, and selections that could possibly be deadly. And in one other sense, the poem is a memento of friendship, a seemingly unlikely friendship, between three Nobel Prize-winners. Czesław Miłosz was one in all them. The others had been Albert Camus and Albert Einstein. The coded we talk about under—written in a panicky, coded period—data the phobia of this time.
The groundbreaking Princeton physicist had befriended and suggested Miłosz, therefore the gratitude expressed by a poem devoted to him. In a 1950 letter to Anna Kowalska, Miłosz thought-about publishing the poem “Do Einsteina” [To Einstein] within the journal Zeszytie Wrocławskie.[2] It by no means occurred, so the primary lengthy portion of the poem was translated by Miłosz and revealed in Yr of the Hunter in 1995. It was revealed in Polish in 2004 and can seem subsequent yr in its entirety in English with the publication of Miłosz’s Washington and New York poems, written throughout his years as a diplomat, translated by Robert Hass and David Frick as Poet of the New World: Poems, 1946-1953.
Einstein was not at all times the beloved icon he has since turn out to be. He courted controversy. He had known as for the creation of a world authorities to regulate atomic power. In line with Miłosz, “he had displayed the extraordinary lack of tact to talk within the protection of all mankind, leaving no chance for a division into dangerous males and good males, i.e., for demonology, which was in any case what actually mattered.”[3] However Einstein was barred from making his pitch for concern of Russian response. Mentioned Miłosz: “I used to be grateful for his melancholy smile, proof that he understood, that he didn’t condemn people who find themselves powerless regardless of their good will.” Remembering his good friend and fellow exile, Miłosz reminisced that “the whole lot about him appealed to my father advanced, my craving for a protector and chief. I felt remorseful in direction of him due to the shame of what occurred through the first Congress in Protection of Peace, held in Wrocław, Poland, in 1948.”[4]
The world thought a hazard had handed, but it surely had not. The world endlessly lives with the information that it may possibly destroy itself. Its horrors hover over the way forward for the human race and proceed to hazard generations, together with these not but born. Nuclear energy . . . the second that confirmed the worst of us.
Whereas nations wrangled, a separate peace reigned in a nook in Paris, in an condominium overlooking Luxembourg Gardens, the place a superb circle of friendship gathered, uniting the dwelling and the useless—Einstein, Camus, and Miłosz—with an invisible fourth, Simone Weil, who influenced all of them. The traces are present in Miłosz’s poetry. Weil had perished in 1943, after all, however her spirit was with them, and the matriarch, Salomea Weil, or “Selma” as she was identified, welcomed her friends. This small group of individuals, dwelling or not, give us a hope that runs deeper than worldwide conferences and extends past dying.
Miłosz mentioned that life in Europe can be not possible, “if it weren’t for the existence of some subterranean rivers”—these rivers once more—that solely infrequently reveal their presence.” He continued:
Entry to them is tough, and the initiated don’t like to point out others the paths resulting in them; these are rivers of jealously guarded hope . . . those that quench their thirst at these waters acknowledge one another immediately with the primary phrases spoken. Often one in all these rivers involves the floor, and we give it the title of an individual. One such particular person is Simone Weil.[5]
How a lot did Weil sway Miłosz? “Distance is the soul of magnificence,” Miłosz mentioned in his Nobel tackle. Weil’s phrases clearly impressed his brief poem, “Love.” The interpretation by Robert Hass begins this fashion: “Love means to study to take a look at your self / The way in which one appears to be like at distant issues.”
That’s one small instance however there are extra. The affect and pondering of this ascetic thinker permeates the work and lifetime of this sensual and omnivorous poet and thinker.
What introduced Czeslaw Miłosz and Albert Camus collectively? Each knew firsthand how idealism can flip to slaughter. Camus gave early warning of the Stalinist camps in what Miłosz would later name “the opposite Europe,” east of the Danube, and so he was ostracized by the up-to-date thinkers of the pro-Stalin café society. Miłosz watched with rising terror as political tyranny swallowed nations. He would later say:
I really feel that the best asset that my a part of Europe obtained within the historical past of the 20 th century, the privilege of our being the avant-garde of inhumanity, is that the query of true and false, good and evil, turned operative once more. Specifically, good and evil, true and false haven’t been found by way of philosophical discourse, however empirically, just like the style of bread.[6]
That understanding alone would put him miles forward of his colleagues who had succumbed to the au courant Stalinism of Paris.
Whereas Miłosz was furiously, relentlessly writing The Captive Thoughts in Maisons-Laffitte, Albert Camus revealed The Insurgent in 1951. In it, he renounced the revolutionary violence preached by Paris’s bien pensants. He was personally horrified by what the West was then studying of the Soviet camps, even because it rejected and denied what it was starting to listen to. Camus’s break with Sartre was public and nasty.
The distinction with the modest ink-stained desk with a view to Luxembourg Gardens is startlingly sharp, morally clear. Virtually a century later, we are able to nonetheless be a part of them in spirit, exploring that assembly of minds between Einstein, Camus, and Miłosz, all underneath the star of Simone Weil. One good friend noticed her as on a kind of metaphysical threshold, utterly remoted from her contemporaries: “To these of her era (e.g. Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir), her asceticism gave the impression to be an absurd type of neurosis. Camus [by contrast] was interested in her by his personal ethical ardour.”[7]
Miłosz and Camus turned associates, and each fell underneath the spell of this stranger amongst them, the one who couldn’t be a part of them, the one they might encounter solely in thought. As Camus would say of his muse in a press convention earlier than accepting the Nobel Prize: “There are useless people who find themselves nearer to us than most of the dwelling.” So they might communicate of the younger visionary French thinker from the École Normale.
What lucky fruit would this nest of associations bear? For one, Miłosz translated Weil’s Chosen Works into Polish in 1958, fifteen years after her dying, when her work was nonetheless obscure and unknown. His accomplishment has been largely underestimated and missed. But that achievement would bear magnificent fruit a decade later, within the Sixties, with a brand new openness to her work. She perished alone, a sufferer of her self-imposed self-discipline of poverty and humility; now she is a world legacy.
Maybe it isn’t a coincidence that the sample can be a trademark of Miłosz’s life in exile: selfless service to the work of others—his translating Anna Swir involves thoughts, so does his recording of Aleksandr Wat’s memoirs. Extra: The Historical past of Polish Literature and the Postwar Polish Poetry. He impressed the identical selflessness in others—one thinks of Robert Hass, an eminent and awarded poet who gave years of his life translating a poet he thought-about the higher grasp. It has been mentioned, and it’s true, that you simply can not discuss to Bob Hass for half an hour with out the dialog turning to Miłosz.
Miłosz was keenly conscious of this “religious contagion,” a “good an infection.” Notre Dame Prof. Artur Sebastian Rosman wrote,
Violent in her judgments and uncompromising, Simone Weil was, no less than by temperament, an Albigensian, a Cathar; that is the important thing to her thought. She drew excessive conclusions from the Platonic in Christianity. Right here we contact upon hidden ties between her and Albert Camus. The primary work by Camus was his college dissertation on St. Augustine. Camus, in my view, was additionally a Cathar, a pure one, [“Cathar” from Gr. katharos, pure] and if he rejected God it was out of affection for God as a result of he was not in a position to justify him. The final novel written by Camus, The Fall, is nothing else however a treatise on Grace—absent grace—although it’s also a satire: the talkative hero, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who reverses the phrases of Jesus and as an alternative of “Decide not and ye shall not be judged”: provides the recommendation “Decide, and ye shall not be judged,” could possibly be, I’ve motive to suspect, Jean-Paul Sartre.[8]
The Nobel laureate Albert Camus would appear to be the odd man out, however not so: the existentialist couldn’t, attempt as he would possibly, get past good and evil. The witty Rosman once more:
Most of his literary works collapse underneath the burden of attempting to cowl up their origins in, and direct money owed to, classical Christian doctrines, particularly Authentic Sin. It’s as if he retains attempting to roll a rock to seal off the tomb, solely to seek out it rolled away each darn morning. Simply take a look at the plots of The Fall, The Plague, and The First Man and inform me God shouldn’t sue for copyright infringement upon the biblical narrative.[9]
Camus sought a means out of the darkness, as he confronted the hopelessness of that place and that period, in a future with out God. Therefore, he created and edited a e book collection known as Hope (Espoir) for Gallimard. Its aim: to see if “one can get out of nihilism.” Simone Weil’s work Gravity and Grace appeared for the primary time in his journal. “In his tentative and incomplete style, he was feeling his means in direction of acceptance of a form of pure regulation and an affirmation of common human nature.”[10]
When Camus’s 1957 Nobel was introduced, he went instantly to see Madame Weil and flee the press, and to sit down once more amongst Weil’s unpublished manuscripts, on the ink-stained desk the place Simone had labored. He requested Selma Weil for a photograph of her daughter to take with him to the Nobel ceremonies. When requested by a reporter in Stockholm which writers he felt closest to, Camus named the poet Réné Char and Simone Weil. When the journalist noticed that Weil was useless, Camus replied that dying by no means comes between true associates. He famously known as her the one nice spirit of our time.
An atheist? Not precisely. Miłosz mentioned Camus was undoubtedly a “Manichaean.” An opportunity assembly led to Camus’s brief friendship with a Methodist minister on the American Church in Paris.[11] The minister left an account that the 2 talked about Christianity continually, and at their final assembly, Camus requested to be re-baptized in personal. The minister recommended they suppose it over a bit, however Camus died in a automotive accident in 1960 earlier than they may meet once more.
***
In the meantime, Miłosz used his time as a diplomat strategically and effectively. In New York, he met with America’s main poets and writers and solid an vital friendship with the playwright Thornton Wilder, who would defend the poet’s household within the years to return, attempting to influence him to leap ship and settle in America. However nonetheless he was tortured by his indecision.
Einstein spoke from expertise, however expertise of a special sort. Einstein appeared to have little firsthand notion of what was taking place in Japanese Europe, and didn’t know what Miłosz can be dealing with if he went again. Doable arrest, censorship, persecution, even dying. So Miłosz left the scientist’s prim white colonial home on Mercer Avenue realizing that he needed to take care of his disaster alone. In Franaszek’s biography this feels like a disappointing second. It could have been the other.
There may be one vital and infrequently missed memento of this alignment of genius—a poem that was partially revealed in 1995’s Yr of the Hunter, in Miłosz’s personal translation. It didn’t seem in his subsequent collections, nor within the American Collected of 2001. It’s a memento of the tortured years of indecision, his postwar life in alien America:
This New Jerusalem of the outdated Puritans,
Their dream realized nevertheless a lot the fallacious means,
Is for me an empty stage set, and a burden,
As if I needed to cry out in my sleep, and may’t.
There was a lot in these instances to make one cry out in the midst of the evening The struggle was over, however a special struggle was starting in what Miłosz known as “the opposite Europe.” For Miłosz, the indecision to remain, or to defect, was torture. No surprise he “wished to cry out . . . and may’t.”
This poem is dated 1948-49, the winter of the beavers on the river. The separation from his household, his spouse’s tough, life-threatening pregnancies, the fixed spying by either side of the Chilly Struggle . . . Anthony Miłosz says that’s what the paranoia and insanity that bothered his son Peter. The household was uncovered to strangers whose motives they may not belief or consider.
All of it comes collectively on this outstanding poem. I spent lengthy afternoons and a number of other telephone calls discussing it with translator Scott, now in his nineties, and am indebted to him for bringing it to my consideration. The Einstein poem is a show-stopper, and we will probably be parsing it, on either side of the Atlantic, for years to return. It’s a cryptic poem that concludes with a mysteriously elliptical query:
Are we in actual fact the enemies of the species,
Who want to change human beings by power
Into angels of pure mind, to tear from the depths
That hated spark for which Prometheus was tortured.
Prometheus, one of many Titans, stole hearth from the gods—and was punished cruelly for it, chained to a rock with an eagle arriving every day to nibble at his liver. However his struggling was the making of mankind. Miłosz reminds us that the promethean hearth is a two-edged sword, bringing expertise and information to mankind, but in addition the atomic bomb—the very dilemma that Miłosz warned about in his lectures and writings. Maybe that’s the reason it’s a “hated spark.”
The parable of Prometheus isn’t merely an archaic delusion of punishment and revenge—it’s a story rooted in gratitude to the Titan. The “hated spark” Miłosz writes about is greater than the reward of fireplace that warms our winters and cooks our meals. It embraces human intelligence and creativity, which is born on this very disobedience. The presents of Prometheus are what make us human. And the parable that’s created, the work of a poet or storyteller, is greater than a warning. It’s a celebration of the hero who introduced our humanity to us, who made it acutely aware to us. Prometheus was the lover of mankind, its ally. And for that he was tortured mercilessly.
The world won’t say “thanks.” The truth is, we spurn the Promethean presents every day. We want to reject the reward and the accountability: “to tear from the depths / That hated spark for which Prometheus was tortured.” For Miłosz his activity was “the phrases he couldn’t communicate however should,” as he says within the poem.
The poet is a creator however stands other than Creation—the world of esse. Prometheus takes motion and takes punishment—a divinely ordained exile. Higher to talk the phrases which can be urgent towards his lips, as he says, “As if I needed to cry out in my sleep, and may’t.” The phrases would pour out a number of years later into Captive Thoughts, as he was ingesting and smoking and pacing his hideaway in Maisons-Laffitte, fearful for his life.
Did Miłosz see himself, as a kind of Prometheus, bringing us his perishable reward, his personal providing to mankind? Was artistry sufficient? Miłosz, the creator of poems, the creator of visions and worlds . . . was he additionally the sufferer of the Promethean curse? Was the exile, the dying of two wives, the insanity of his son, the flip aspect of Prometheus’s reward? He usually prayed for a launch from his crosses.
The Greeks honored Prometheus. They celebrated technē, the humanities and abilities that introduced us human tradition, the presents of civilization. The story isn’t a cautionary story—it’s an act of braveness that separated us from the animals. Like many myths, the hero is destroyed and but lives. The tales we inform ourselves matter, and how we inform them issues—and that’s true of Prometheus, who will be seen because the riot towards the gods, or because the one who introduced our humanity, who, by his very act of disobedience, made us acutely aware of our consciousness.
And one riot provides beginning to a different: our hostility to tradition, civilization, expertise, is an extension of Prometheus’s defiance. Prometheus rebelled, and now we too insurgent towards the very genius that introduced us life. That’s the newer spin. We insurgent towards our arts, cities, literature, towards the very notion of progress. We fantasize returning to the wild, although we couldn’t dwell with out a microwave.
The spirit of Prometheus connects us with all of our presents, and all that they precise from us. He hyperlinks us with our rise from the mud and our return to it. The presents that technē brings and the prices that every one these presents precise stand up earlier than us. Prometheus connects our high-tech current with our primitive previous, and reminds us of the tough stability between each.
What will we owe mankind, and what does it owe us? How does the poet dwell out his personal reward? Miłosz questioned the function of the poet, to ponder esse, to face other than the roar of time. What was the function of the poet in time? What did he owe historical past?
***
Towards the top of his life, Miłosz described “second area,” a dimension exterior our common area and time, right here and now. Allow us to hope it’s a dimension exterior wars and domination as effectively.
From a poem known as “Powers,” one of many poems in Second Area, the gathering that got here out the yr of his dying:
Although of weak religion, I imagine in forces and powers,
Who crowd each inch of the air.
Maybe his sense of second area expanded his horizons past the loneliness and limitations of the exile. Maybe “second area” was his closing dwelling. “I don’t really feel displaced,” he mentioned in a 1982 New York Occasions interview. “I really feel all of the tragedies and excitements of this time, which is a really cosmopolitan time. Allow us to not create myths about exile if all of us, we’re exiles—hah? What’s good in America is that you’ve the sensation of common exile.” What got here out of those associations, the anguish of those years? This poem to Albert Einstein, for one factor. The thick Chosen Works of Weil, for an additional. We must always not underestimate both.
We’re a great distance from that river in Pennsylvania greater than eighty years in the past, ready for the beavers earlier than daybreak. On the Pennsylvania river, his ruminations about time, historical past, and civilizations had been interrupted by a decided splat! The beaver caught the human scent and plunged again into the darkish river, interrupting the poet’s ideas. “The reminiscence grows bigger than my life,”[12] Miłosz recalled. The poet had wished to pluck the everlasting second from nature—that was Thornton Wilder’s provide of a farm within the countryside, in the intervening time he was contemplating defection. However in the long run, he votes for Prometheus. He will get blended into the motion that’s historical past.
Briefly, he defected.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay was the “Miłosz Lecture” for the 2024 Kraków Literary Pageant. The episode of the beavers and the river was tailored from Cynthia L. Haven, Czesław Miłosz: A California Life (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2021; Kraków: Znak, 2024).
[1] Miłosz, Yr of the Hunter, 121.
[2] Ewa Kołodziejczyk, Czesław Miłosz in Postwar America, p. 45, fn 128.
[3] Czesław Miłosz, Proud to be a Mammal: Essays on Struggle, Religion and Reminiscence (London: Penguin,2010), trans. Catherine Leach, Bogdana Carpenter, and Madeline G. Levine, 185.
[4] Miłosz, Proud to be a Mammal, xx.
[5] Miłosz, To Start The place I Am, 199.
[6] Nathan Gardels, “The Withering Away of Society: An Interview with Czesław Miłosz, in Czesław Miłosz: Conversations (Jackson, Miss.: College Press of Mississippi, 2006), 72.
[7] Gabriella Fiori, “The Story of a Friendship.”
[8] Artur Rosman, “Understanding Simone Weil’s Quest for the Absolute,” Cosmos the in Misplaced, June 24, 2013.
[9] Artur Rosman, “Well-known Atheists Who Weren’t Atheists 2: The Christianity of Camus,” Cosmos the in Misplaced, June 30, 2013.
[10] Robert Royal, “Camus Between God and Nothing,” First Issues, January 2014.
[11] Recounted in Howard Mumma, Albert Camus & the Minister (Paraclete Press, 2000).
[12] Treatise on Poetry, p. 45.
