September 12, 2004
Lines I wish I wrote, #3
Leon Wieseltier, who was widely taken to task for his last outing for the New York Times Book Review (a review of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint), writes an appreciation of Czeslaw Milosz on the back page of today's issue. It includes these two lines, marked in bold, which gracefully summarize much of what has been written about the poet in the month since his death, on August 14:
He was a hero of the history of his time and a hero of the literature of his time. For friends and for strangers, for lovers of liberty and for lovers of beauty, he was, for more than half a century, an indispensible man. Milosz discharged his obligations to his age and his obligations to his soul with the same diligence and the same depth. The stability of his mind, its preternatural composure, was one of the great sanctuaries of the 20th century, a prophecy of the eventual emancapation. He had the rare gift of knowing how to be at once troubled and unperturbed. When light was needed, he was light; when stone was needed, he was stone.