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Aug 18, 2004

"The purple-black earth of vegetable gardens
Will be here, either looked at or not.
The sea, as today, will breathe from its depths.
Growing small, I disappear in the immense, more and more free.
" --Czeslaw Milosz

Growing small, I disappear

He spent years in exile, stared some of the worst torture of the 20th century in the face and won the nobel prize in literature. His work grappled ceaselessly with the religious and metaphysical paradox of how to live, and maintain one's faith, in a world of mass-scale suffering. Robert Hass, a fellow laureate said of his friend: "He had the idea that he could somehow redeem all the suffering if he could find a way to grasp the nature of his own experience of life and words. That was his great quest. It's the passion that made him a great poet." Czeslaw Milosz died on August 14, 2004.