WE HAVE ALREADY LIVED IN THE REAL PARADISE

Caspar Friedrich, The Chalk Cliffs on Ruegen, 1818

The past week started badly: Monday I woke from a nightmare in the wee hours, my heart pounding so loud and fast that scared me as much as the nightmare itself. The dream seemed a relapse to the years when I had recurrent dreams about being in a Nazi concentration camp. Then, in two dreams in a row, I was able to escape (in the last one, simply walk out) – and thought that this was the end of that nasty series. I even celebrated it with a little poem that wrote itself in my early minimalist, unpunctuated style (startling, those incursions of a younger inner poet):

THE ROAD TAKEN

Only a year ago I finally understood
the kingdom of hell
is within you
and chose to walk out of
that concentration camp

the gate’s wide wings stood open
the guards diligently did not look
the road led through sunlit woods
between bridal birches the road in heaven
I must have seen in childhood and forever

and only yesterday looking out the window
I thought this is my country now and not
a Nazi factory or a Siberian gulag
astonished that after all
I wasn’t sentenced to hard labor

only this morning I saw
my task is to keep on walking
reading sunlight and shadow
listening to birds in all their languages
announce the holy word home

~ Oriana © 2012

**

Re-reading the poem after my nightmare I remembered that in the camp lingo, “the road to heaven” – Himmelweg – meant to way to the gas chamber.

So there it was, an invasion of the awareness of evil into what otherwise seemed like a peaceful and happy period of my life. Another night’s good sleep normalized me, but I know I’ll remember this experience as another example of how the good and the bad, sickness and health, happiness and unhappiness, and side by side, woven (or maybe “tangled”) together. Just when you think everything is going great, life will send you a reminder that things are never so simple. And the other way: even while watching a harrowing Holocaust movie like “In Darkness” (one of the best ever, comparable to “The Pianist”), I couldn’t help thinking, “These are the cutest rats.” Pigeons never looked so good either as glimpsed from that sewer manhole.

Evil, evil everywhere. Evil and flowers and iridescent pigeons (isn’t it time to admit how beautiful pigeons are?) Thus, when Jack Gilbert says, “We have already lived in the real paradise,” I nod my head (a gross understatement: when I first came upon the line, it hit me with great power). I, with my nightmares and memories I’d rather not come near – though I don’t claim to have suffered more than most – I am strangely moved and shaken by this assertion: “We have already lived in the real paradise.” Not the imaginary one, but the real, imperfect paradise, to steal Linda Pastan’s phrase.

Yes, our very imperfect paradise, with one kind of hell or another periodically tossed in. I don’t know a single adult who’s been spared, who doesn’t know what pain is. But paradise nevertheless. And that is stunning, that we have had such abundance of beauty and affection. I think that has kept most of us alive – the secret knowledge that no matter how great the suffering of the moment, we know what paradise is because we have seen and experienced it. When people say, peacefully, that they are ready to depart, I sense that they feel they have already had their share of paradise.

We judge a poet by his or her best poems. And ultimately, I think, we also remember life by life’s best poems. I’m a softie. One great sunset, and I forgive everything.

Gilbert puts it best:

GETTING AWAY WITH IT

We have already lived in the real paradise.
Horses in the empty summer street.
Me eating the hot wurst I couldn’t afford,
in frozen Munich, tears dropping. We can
remember. A child in the outfield waiting
for the last fly ball of the year. So dark
already it was black against heaven.
The voices trailing away to dinner,
calling faintly in the immense distance.
Standing with my hands open, watching it
curve over and start down, turning white
at the last second. Hands down. Flourishing.

~ Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven

Gilbert deliberately chooses non-spectacular details: horses in the empty summer street, eating a hot sausage on a freezing day, “the voices trailing away to dinner, / calling faintly in the immense distance.” The ball “black against heaven,” then turning white when very close. I know nothing about baseball, and my examples would be different, but I know what Gilbert is trying to convey: the wonderful moments can’t be denied. And maybe the harder the life, the more the moments of grace seem paradise. During my hardest years, the years of perdition, I remember hearing Haydn’s trios for the first time. So yes, I have already lived in the real paradise.

In a short poem, every word matters. It’s interesting that Gilbert chooses the word “heaven” (“already it was black against heaven”) rather than “sky.” “Heaven” amplifies “paradise” – the paradise in this life, as the poem makes clear. Gilbert’s heaven is in line with Jack Lennon’s “above us, only sky” (“Imagine”), but having that sky is marvelous. Later we have “voices . . . calling faintly in the immense distance.” These are human voices, the voices of mothers calling their boys home, and the distance is not literally immense. It’s immense in memory, and immense when we think of all the mothers calling their children home for dinner.

It’s not that Gilbert doesn’t realize that there is much evil in the world. But in his view, “we must risk delight.” Even if another, gentler world awaits, we must drink in the glory of the earth. In one of his best-known poems, “A Brief for the Defense,” Gilbert insists,

To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end has magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.

           

“Music despite everything.” While seeing earth as paradise, at least some of the time, is a modern attitude, music has often been recognized as a portion of divinity that we can know while alive. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s praise of music could hardly be higher:

Music, the greatest good that mortals know,

And all of heaven we have below.

For all my love of music, I must object. Music is all of heaven we know? My heaven includes the shrill cry of a seagull, the ocean waves, the mountain meadows, the great mossy woods of northern climates – the list could go on and on, and include also the beautiful silences when love is being born, the lovers’ happy laughter, the affectionate talk of heart-to-heart friends. With more domestic comfort now and less premature dying, we can relax and look around: there is indeed plenty to celebrate, and this is not the Vale of Tears even if it occasionally seems just that.

Keats put it much better by calling the world “the Vale of Soul-Making.” Jung spoke of “individuation.” Maslow came up with “self-actualization.” Then there is the worn phrase, “fulfilling our potential.” It’s a modern ideal; we know that in traditional societies there was much less freedom to explore and pursue one’s interests. I shudder when I think of the past. I find history fascinating, but there is no century in which I’d rather live, especially as a woman.

Joseph Campbell disposed of questions about paradise by saying, Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all you need. He defined “sacred space” as a “place that lets you experience your own will, your own intention, your own wish.” (A room of her own! Did Virginia Woolf know how revolutionary her suggestion was?) This sacred space can be your study and/or your kitchen (women will understand what I mean), or, in the absence a whole room to yourself, a favorite armchair where it’s quiet enough to hear your thoughts – where you can read, and from where you can watch the birds. But Campbell also speaks about the “sacred space within yourself” – “the further you can get into that, the more at peace you will be with yourself.” For me that going into that inner sacred space occurs when I’m deeply engaged in reading or writing. For someone else it might be gardening. We are unique, and our sacred space, within and without, is also unique. Let’s cherish it. Let’s get a geode or a cluster of crystals to “mark our territory.”

“Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do” – that’s certainly one quite plausible definition of paradise. But simply experiencing the beauty of nature is paradise. Yet before the cognitive evolution that has allowed us to see the earth as paradise, even a poet who was a great lover, even a worshipper, of nature’s beauty, Wordsworth assumed that the real paradise is elsewhere – this is where the soul comes from. In his most famous ode, he says,

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

   Hath had elsewhere its setting,

       And cometh from afar.

This sentiment is still repeated by the likes of David Whyte and many other New Age writers. They assume that our essence is not terrestrial but astral, formed on a different, “higher” plane – in the true paradise whose memory we lose as we grow beyond infancy. I’m amazed that the medieval attitude of rejecting the world is still with us, though the ideas of the “fall of man” and exile from the original paradise, or humanity’s decline from the “Golden Age” to the “Silver Age” to the “Iron Age” and so on, a constant diminishment from the original perfection – such notions are finally on their way to becoming intellectual relics. The denigration of this world has long been recognized as essential to organized religion’s attempt to sell to us the next one, with or without the seventy-two virgins. I have to exempt Judaism here, with its solid earthiness and this-life orientation. And I hurry to say that both Wordsworth and Whyte celebrate the beauty of the earth.

Wordsworth was a pioneer. We owe it to the Romantics that the beauty of the nature became celebrated. In the Western culture, for many centuries nature used to be seen as merely savage and dangerous. Forests and mountains were the meeting places of witches. Before 1750 or so, the idea of hiking in the wilderness for pleasure would strike most people as insane.

Contrast this with Byron’s famous lines in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

As for Wordsworth's descriptions of nature, there are too many to choose from. I don't mean just his joy in the daffodils and rainbows and cuckoo calls, but more so his feelings of awe as he watches a sunset, the sea, forests and lakes, a mountain waterfall. Nature is his greatest inspiration, even though he goes only halfway toward the modern acknowledgment of the earth and this life as a difficult paradise of the sort that Jack Gilbert presents, along with many other modern poets. 

"We have already lived in the real paradise." For me, this line is revolutionary. Don't forget: I started in the Vale of Tears. An unbaptized infant was already a depraved sinner. All non-Catholics were doomed to burn in hell fire forever. Using the microphone, priests continued to preach the Dark Ages. It's been quite a journey before I could embrace this life and this glorious blue-green planet. 

. . . paradise was when
Dante
regathered from height and depth
   came out onto the soft, green level earth
into the natural light

~ A. R. Ammons

Let me close with this passage from David Wagoner’s “Getting There”:

What have you learned so far? You’ll find out later,
Telling it haltingly
Like a dream, that lost traveler’s dream
Under the last hill
Where through the night you'll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.

You’ve earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you're standing again and breathing, beginning another
Journey without regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom

~ David Wagoner In Broken Country

Hyacinth:

It seems to me that each blog gets better and explores or maybe sets up the exploring of things I am writing about. It inspires me to not give up when I think I'm so far off the meaning of what I want to say. David Whyte has been an influence on my writing. I like especially the way when he gives a reading he repeats a line maybe several times or reads the whole poem over. We get more out of it at every reread, and he knows this.

Oriana:

Thank you. I feel that I’m deepening my own exploration of various central themes that engaged me over the years. What I seek in poetry is wisdom – an unfashionable attitude, so I’m thankful to all the readers of this blog for their loyalty and interest.

David Whyte has done a service to poetry lovers. I hope I didn’t come across as condemning him. His New Age incursions are few; on the whole he is in awe of the mystery of life right here. He wants us to listen to our deeper knowing. Insofar as I’ve done it, it has moved me toward my “happy atheist” stance and away from any delusions of a better life in some New Age neverland. We should call ourselves earthlings or something similar that would announce our being part of nature. It’s the constant setting ourselves as apart from nature that has brought about much evil. We evolved right here, in this glorious place; let’s fully embrace our home. 

**

(I sent John an old Jewish saying: Life is so terrible that it would have been better not to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand.”)

John:

Good quote – it gets to the complexity at the heart of so many things.  I think people like to see the world and life and themselves simply (I'm blessed) but it's not just that.  We're also doomed and damned and happy and confused and clear

– all at the same time.  My mother was in a convalescent home recovering from cancer surgery and she heard some nurses down the hall laughing about something and she turned to me and said, "Half of us are dying and the other half are going to a party."  

I think what she was said was true about the self too.

Oriana:

Yes, I remember it – another wonderful quote from your mother. It does apply to life, to self. Everyone’s life is part happiness, part suffering. Yet we see life as a blessing, as having a great value. I’ve grown to love this quotation: “There will be music in spite of everything” ~ Jack Gilbert. And his life was rough in so many ways (I speak in the past tense, since now he has dementia).

Yes, we have to acknowledge both the paradise and the suffering. It’s still a real paradise, but when hell opens up, it’s real too. Again, it helps to remember that there will be music in spite of everything. There will be beauty, and couples who have just fallen in love, and laughter, and joy.

MOTHER NATURE REVISITED

The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Myself and Señor Xólotl

When you came back to me –

I painted a green day-hand and a brown night-hand
holding up Mexico, her canyons and deserts,
    her candelabra cacti.

And we were there, embraced by our land.
You were my naked baby
who is reborn every minute with your third eye open. 

Even our dog Señor Xólotl was curled
on the wrist of evening,
ready to bear our souls to the underworld if he had to.

Together, we stared out beyond the picture, saw
in the dark window a small woman in a wheelchair
cast out in a workshop far beyond the moon,

desperately mixing the colours of love
    until they vibrated –
watermelon greens, chilli reds, pumpkin orange.

She hurriedly drew the shattered arms
of the universe –
                             holding us all up

as if we were a mountain dripping roots and stones.

From What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010)

© 2011 Pascale Petit

**

The modern idea of nature is chiefly benevolent. We speak of the nurturing “Mother Nature.” We don’t hear much about “Nature red in tooth and claw.” But let us take a look at that interesting passage in Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

55.

The wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave,

Derives it not from what we have

The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world’s altar-stairs

That slope thro’ darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

  

 56.

‘So careful of the type?’ but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death:

The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law–

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed–

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal’d within the iron hills?

No more? A monster then, a dream,

A discord. Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music match’d with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

~ here Nature’s indifference to human needs is duly lamented.  “I care for nothing; all shall go” is her reply to man’s desperate plea for immortality – and if not immortality, then at least of some show of caring.

Man’s helplessness was presented earlier in Canto 54:

So runs my dream, but what am I?

An infant crying in the night,

An infant crying for the light

And with no language but a cry.

~ together with the “lame hands of faith,” Tennyson, though in the end defending religion, seems mainly to have eloquently stated the case for nature’s alleged “cruelty.” Cruelty, however, implies that nature is deliberate evil; in fact, nature is merely amoral, as innocent as that “infant crying in the night.”

It’s interesting that Czeslaw Milosz, known for poems praising the beauty of nature, was not in fact all that far from from Tennyson’s position. He writes,

Amost every day, Public Television airs nature programs, mainly for young people. About spiders, fish, lizards, coyotes, animals of the desert or of alpine meadow, and so on. The technical excellence of the photography doesn’t prevent me from considering these programs obscene. Because what they show offends our human, moral understanding – not only offends it, but subverts it, for the thesis of these programs is: You see, that’s how it is in Nature; therefore, it is natural; and we, too, are a part of Nature, we belong to the evolutionary chain, we have to accept the world as it is.

If I turn off the television, horrified, disgusted by the images of mutual indifferent devouring, and also by the mind of the man who filmed it, is it because I am capable of picturing what this looks like when translated into the life of human society?

. . . The makers of those films have a scientific outlook and show the truth, nothing but the truth; furthermore, they appreciate the splendid photogeneity of nature.

. . . Is hunting and devouring each other the very essence of Nature? It is, that is why I dislike Nature.

~ A Year of the Hunter, pp 48-50 (1994; emphasis mine)

But, as usual, Milosz shows that he has two souls. The prose quoted above was written by his more elevated, Catholic soul. But his cat-loving pagan soul wrote this charming defense of nature:

To Mrs. Professor in Defense Of My Cat's Honor And Not Only

My valiant helper, a small-sized tiger 
Sleeps sweetly on my desk, by the computer, 
Unaware that you insult his tribe. 

Cats play with a mouse or with a half-dead mole. 
You are wrong, though: it's not out of cruelty. 
They simply like a thing that moves. 

For, after all, we know that only consciousness 
Can for a moment move into the Other, 
Empathize with the pain and panic of a mouse. 

And such as cats are, all of Nature is. 
Indifferent, alas, to the good and the evil. 
Quite a problem for us, I am afraid. 

Natural history has its museums, 
But why should our children learn about monsters, 
An earth of snakes and reptiles for millions of years? 

Nature devouring, nature devoured, 
Butchery day and night smoking with blood. 
And who created it? Was it the good Lord? 

Yes, undoubtedly, they are innocent, 
Spiders, mantises, sharks, pythons. 
We are the only ones who say: cruelty. 

Our consciousness and our conscience 
Alone in the pale anthill of galaxies 
Put their hope in a humane God. 

Who cannot but feel and think, 
Who is kindred to us by his warmth and movement, 
For we are, as he told us, similar to Him. 

Yet if it is so, the He takes pity 
On every mauled mouse, every wounded bird. 
Then the universe for him is like a Crucifixion. 

Such is the outcome of your attack on the cat: 
A theological, Augustinian grimace, 
Which makes difficult our walking on this earth.


~ Czeslaw Milosz, Facing the River (1995)

**

Here Milosz acknowledges the innocence of nature. Only humans mistakenly say: cruelty, and imagine the kind of deity who cares for every mouse and bird. Yet if this is so, “then the universe for him is like a Crucifixion,” Milosz brilliantly observes. This position – that nature is “cruel” – only makes our life more difficult. Much as he would like to believe in a totally caring god, Milosz will not condemn his beloved cat. The cat is as innocent as Frida Kahlo's dog, Señor Xólotl "curled . . . on the wrist of evening." 

But wait! The human psyche and human values cannot be so easily dismissed. We are the ones capable of pity for all suffering – and of remembering the beings, human and animal and vegetal, who are no more. Lois P. Jones sent me this beautiful French poem by Rilke:

WHAT SURVIVES 

Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.

It isn’t the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor – from breast to knees –
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. A. Poulin 

***


Michael (at Mile 410 of the Pacific Crest Trail)

I enjoyed wrestling with the thoughts in your most recent post.

A great injustice, an unfortunate thoughtlessness, is the inappropriate use – the gross use – of and in humans and nature – there is no and, humans are nature. We are as much nature as any other creature (and gasp! we haven't even begun talking about the so-called inanimate...). The AND in Human and nature has lead to a world of fear and division and disregard and power-over.

One such consequence is the world as an animal Auschwitz – 58 billion land animals senselessly killed each year for food, worldwide. The creatures taken from the sea are many, many more. I saw a butcher buying goats in NW China. He lead them to his cart, grabbed them by the skin on the back, and hurled each over the 6' side of the cart and let each drop on its back, on the floor. For him, the goat was apart from him. He believed in the AND. Nature is to be controlled. Disregarded. Killed. Not worthy of respect, nor is there reason to be concerned for its suffering.

Last week I was a hiking a few miles south of The Devil's Punchbowl on the PCT and rounded a corner and nearly bumped into two young men. From their clothing I guessed they were on their first day-hike, venturing into the wilds with only Hollywood as a guide. The meeting was sudden, neither of us had heard the other coming. One of them said, "Damn, I thought you were a bear." A bear. Right. But he was serious and to support his concern, he held a handgun, a version of the famed 1911 pistol, hammer back. I wanted to laugh and at the same time slap him silly for being so naive and stupid and for endangering my life and those of others hikers. He believed in the AND.

In a general way it might be said there are two kinds of Pacific Crest Trail hikers: First, those who believe nature is a force to reckon with, to be wary of, and they plan for her volatile ways – these folks carry gear for every contingency – one, two, or even three first aid kits, a satellite phone or tracking device, GPS, maps for several miles in every possible direction, food for an extra day or two, a back-up water filter, too much clothing, snow shoes (in spring and summer?), a shovel, etc. They believe in the AND. The second kind believes nature is benevolent and they pack lightly. These are the ultra-light backpackers. They may carry an extra pair of socks. That's it. Enough food for the miles, no back-up gear. These hikers are nature.

It's the view. Of nature. That allows for these different approaches.

Not far from where I live in San Diego someone has scratched into the concrete sidewalk: WE ARE ONE WITH EVERYTHING! Yes, we are. And the walk we must learn to walk is the one without the AND.

I hear the reasoning of the deep ecologists in your discussion--deep ecologists acknowledge the interconnected of systems, but have little concern for the individual. So the earth didn't pause its ponderous revolution when I was born, nor will it pause when I die. But what would happen if humans ceased to exist? If the oceans died? Or the polar ice caps melt? 

Oriana:

The ice caps are already melting, of course. Humans who run the world (presidents, generals, CEO's) seem like a bunch of young male teenagers. The gang mentality. The adolescent belief that we are “separate, different, and superior.” Why are we superior? Because we have morality, while nature, we were taught, is “red in tooth and claw.”

And anyway, by the time the polar caps are totally melted, that will posterity’s problem, and who really cares for posterity? It’s been observed that some people never use the future tense. 

Even having children and grandchildren does not necessarily make them care. I remember having chatted with a real-estate developer. He said he was working on “developing” the hills around San Luis Obispo. “Not those hills!” I moaned. “That’s such a beautiful area.” “I know,” he replied. I used to hike there when I was in college.” “And where will your children hike?” I asked. At first he pretended not to hear. Then he said, “People need housing,” and became busy working on his laptop.

After all, most agree that profit is more important than nature.

You are correct in your argument that people don’t seem to realize that they ARE nature. Hence either the romanticized, deified version of Nature, or the degraded rape-her-while-you-can nature. But Milosz has gotten himself into a different conundrum. He is disgusted by the food chain: all this devouring. He wants a divine order where maybe we can just feed on light. This reminds me of Linda Pastan’s wonderful poem:

The Imperfect Paradise 

If God had stopped work after the fifth day

With Eden full of vegetables and fruits,

If oak and lilac held exclusive sway

Over a kingdom made of stems and roots,

If landscape were the genius of creation

And neither man nor serpent played a role

And God must look to wind for lamentation

And not to picture postcards of the soul,

Would he have rested on his bank of cloud,

With nothing in the universe to lose,

Or would he hunger for a human crowd?

Which would a wise and just creator choose:

The green hosannas of a budding leaf

Or the strict contract between love and grief?

~ Linda Pastan

Nevertheless, Milosz is sane enough not to call nature “cruel.” After having witnessed a huge amount of human cruelty, he knows very well that it’s not his cat that is cruel. And he realizes that not even the God of Love (as opposed to Blakean “Nobodaddy”) could open up to all suffering, because then the universe would be a constant crucifixion. And even God wants to be happy! So, in midst of sorrow, we must choose to live in joy. Only a basically joyful person, I suspect, can be emotionally strong enough to try to actively minimize suffering and environmental destruction. 


But what I particularly fear is people who don’t seem to have any sense of the sacred or, what may be equivalent, a sense of beauty. 

Scott:


Where DO you find those pictures?! The clarity of the images for your posts are really striking. I really liked the Chinese fisherman with his cormorants, saw one of those birds just this weekend on the coast of Georgia. The Chinese fisherman image on your post brought to mind, oddly enough, the thought of the Quakers and their being known as
Children of the Light; Lowell's 'Quaker Graveyard on Nantucket' comes to mind as well. 

Which that leads to Melville(Lowell as you probably know makes many allusions to 'Moby Dick'). Melville was haunted by Calvinism most of his life. Like Milosz he never fully escaped his upbringing though at the end of his life he seemed to have acquired some peace.

Oriana:


For images, I scour the Internet. The best images are often not attributed, to my astonishment. But maybe it’s better that way, in line with Internet generosity.

That's a wonderful comparison of Melville's Calvinism to Milosz's old-time Catholicism. Either way, it's not a lovable deity. I think Milosz had at least some moments of peace – several late poems indicate that. He felt that at least in his old age he’d be accepted “as is” – but certainly without any apologies for the huge amount of suffering he had to witness or experience, for the silence when he prayed that the suffering of others be relieved. I think Milosz arrived at moments of blissful acceptance and moments of agonized acceptance.