An Appreciation

I wish I had said something sooner about the recent passing of Czeslaw Milosz, a great poet and thinker, but more than that, a man of exceptional moral courage and intelligence. After his defection from Communist Poland, Milosz paid a great tribute to George Orwell, who had written, as far as Milosz was concerned, a clinically accurate description of totalitarianism in 1984, and whom Milosz was astonished to learn had never spent any time behind the iron curtain. I wish I could pay as eloquent a tribute to Milosz. This obituary from the Guardian will have to do. I'll reprint the excerpted poetry with which the obituary closes:

We drove before dawn through frozen fields,
The red wing was rising, yet still the night.
And suddenly a hare shot across our path.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago and both are dead:
The hare and the man who stretched his arm.
O my love, where are they, where do they lead,
The flash of a hand, the line of movement, the swishing icy ground -
I ask not in sorrow, but in contemplation.