In brief, here is a lovely article in the Dublin Review of Books about the renowned poet Czesław Miłosz, recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. Miłosz ought to be best known amongst Jews, however, as a man whose worldview and philosophy were self-consciously refracted through his interactions with Jews. Miłosz--born in Vilna and living much of the 1930s and '40s in Warsaw--declared that it is only through the "anti-natural" human acts of religious life, politics, ideology and culture that one overcomes the senseless necessity of nature. "The Jews helped to form a complex in me," he wrote, "thanks to which, at an early age, I was already lost for the [Catholic, nationalist] Right."
Aside from the insight I gained from the piece, I was much moved by it. I both felt and thought that much of Miłosz's driving spirit is shared by the many Jews that I meet at morning minyan or at a shiva or at some other shared moment of tefillah. They seem to know that through these acts they are investing this world with a meaning that--though it may not be easily articulated--spits in the eye of the cruel "natural" banalities of this world.
Czesław Miłosz would be a 100 years old this year. May his memory be a blessing.
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