Miłosz is like the world and, just like the world, he has a lot of secrets. One of them is his attitude to those he lost in the war—his colleagues, friends, peers. I want to tear it from him; I want to interview his shadow about the rules that determined his relationships. What was he ashamed of ? What was he trying to escape? Who did he protect? Why writing about the living he failed to mention the dead? Why did he shift attention away from his own person? What hurt him? And why so much?

The Religious Apprehension of the World

Haunted by fears and vague metaphysical intuitions, imagination today is subject to irreversible erosion. God is not thought of otherwise than in quotation marks, and so is used mainly as a rhetorical figure expressing what is not completely apprehensible or possible to encompass. In such a world, poetry, too, struggles with the loss of meaning. It cannot provide convincing answers to the questions that life poses to it, thus becoming heavy, incomprehensible, unable to exceed itself, with the result that it eats its own tail. This is why it must be simplified at all costs, first by giving up any unnecessary formal complexities—one should learn about a pine tree from the tree itself. In this respect, certain patterns can be found in the poetry of the East, except that it generally remains deaf to the questions that have puzzled the Old Continent for thousands of years: the difference between good and evil, God and creation, freedom and necessity, mind and body. “I do not hide the fact,” as Miłosz writes in one of his essays,