ArteFact

Time rules over man. It propels him through life, which is short when compared with eternity, and ushers him through life’s events, which often seem inconsequential beside history’s kings and wars. All of man’s experiences exist in and through time, and the means by which man communicates these experiences and thoughts—language—is also temporally bound. The nature of a novel, a poem, a sentence, or even a word, signals its mortality. It exists in time; it begins, and it ends.

Reading Czesław Miłosz’s poetry can feel a bit surreal these days. Frequent visual echoes of his poems flash by on screens, images of cities turned to rubble, armored vehicles patrolling through wreckage, and refugees fleeing across eastern Europe. Miłosz’s poetry is partly a poetry of witness, work influenced by his first-hand confrontation of Nazi and Communist aggression during and after the Second World War.