Czesław Miłosz

Whoever saw, as many did, a whole city reduced to rubble — kilometers of streets on which there remained no trace of life, not even a cat, not even a homeless dog — emerged with a rather ironic attitude toward descriptions of the hell of the big city by contemporary poets, descriptions of the hell in their own souls. A real "wasteland" is much more terrible than any imaginary one. Whoever has not dwelt in the midst of horror and dread cannot know how strongly a witness and participant protests against himself, against his own neglect and egoism. Destruction and suffering are the school of social thought.

Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds

To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.

I put this book here for you, who once lived

So that you should visit us no more.

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

The masses in highly industrialized countries like England, the United States, or France are largely de-Christianized. Technology, and the way of life it produces, undermines Christianity far more effectively than do violent measures.

Never has there been a close study of how necessary to a man are the experiences which we clumsily call aesthetic. Such experiences are associated with works of art for only an insignificant number of individuals. The majority find pleasure of an aesthetic nature in the mere fact of their existence within the stream of life. In the cities, the eye meets colorful store displays, the diversity of human types. Looking at passers-by, one can guess from their faces the story of their lives. This movement of the imagination when a man is walking through a crowd has an erotic tinge; his emotions are very close to physiological sensations.

Only when two times, two forms are drawn

Together and their legibility

Disturbed, do you see that immortality

Is not very different from the present

And is for its sake. You pick a fragment

Of grenade which pierced the body of a song

On Daphnis and Chloe.

— How is it, Chloe, that your pretty skirt

Is torn so badly by the winds that hurt

Real people, you who, in eternity, sing

The hours, sun in your hair appearing

And disappearing? How is that your breasts

Are pierced by shrapnel, and the oak groves burn,

While you, charmed, caring not at all, turn

To run through forests of machinery and concrete

And haunt us with the echoes of your feet?

Someone will read as moral

That the people of Rome or Warsaw

Haggle, laugh, make love

As they pass by martyrs' pyres.

Someone else will read

Of the passing of things human,

Of the oblivion

Born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only

Of the loneliness of the dying,

Of how, when Giordano

Climbed to his burning

There were no words

In any human tongue

To be left for mankind,

Mankind who live on.