And Yet The Books...

I used to think that adulthood was defined as that stage of your life when you set aside poetry for the minutiae of daily living: friends and their problems, deadlines, tax returns, landlords, the permanent freelancer's affliction known as 'nomonia', paperwork, relationships, numerous changes of residence, all that shit.
Then a few years ago, a friend sent me a poem I'd read and loved as a teenager, but had managed to banish from memory. He didn't know this, but the poem, which he'd handwritten in lovely cursive writing on mellow handmade paper, reached me at a point when I'd decided to give up trying to scrape a living from hackwork and do something more lucrative instead, like join the corporate rat race.
And Yet The Books, by Czeslaw Milosz, reached just in time to remind me about all the stuff that was really important to me. Reading, freedom, ideas, beauty. It's all in there. Milosz, 93, died on Sunday (obituaries here, here and here), but this poem, like a lot of his other work, is something I'll carry with me forever. Here it is:

And Yet the Books

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
"We are," they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.

I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.


Czeslaw Milosz


A few of his poems are available here; and here's an excerpt from his Nobel lecture.
"The exile of a poet is today a simple function of a relatively recent discovery: that whoever wields power is also able to control language and not only with the prohibitions of censorship, but also by changing the meaning of words. A peculiar phenomenon makes its appearance: the language of a captive community acquires certain durable habits; whole zones of reality cease to exist simply because they have no name. There is, it seems, a hidden link between theories of literature as Écriture, of speech feeding on itself, and the growth of the totalitarian state. In any case, there is no reason why the state should not tolerate an activity that consists of creating "experimental" poems and prose, if these are conceived as autonomous systems of reference, enclosed within their own boundaries. Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot."