I'm going to read you two poems, which
seem to me to relate to this idea that I'm trying to present
in this paragraph about a certain type of writer
and about what is coming in the next century.
And in a way what is nature actually
the century that we have just finished living through
and how we were going to have to alter our ideas of what
that century was.
The first is a poem by Czesław Miłosz,
"Bypassing Rue Descartes," and this
is a poem about Miłosz coming as a young man from the provinces
of Wilno to Paris.
And what he found and you have when
you think about Paris in this one piece,
what do we think about?
You think about Hemingway?
You think about Picasso?
We think about the art?
The expatriates.
But there was another Paris though, it
was the Paris of Ho Chi Minh, it is
a Paris of Deng Xiaoping, who said
he found in Paris a love of croissants and communism.
And Miłosz-- and it was these people
who came from the provinces, from these small countries
around the globe.
So this is about Miłosz's experience of that.
"Bypassing Rue Descartes.
Bypassing rue Descartes, I descended towards the Seine,
shy, a traveler, a young barbarian just come
to the capital of the world.
We were many, from Jassy and Koloshvar, Wilno and Bucharest,
Saigon, and Marrakesh, ashamed to remember
the customs of our homes about which nobody here should ever
be told.
The clapping for servants, barefooted girls
hurry in, dividing food with incantations, choral prayers
recited by master and household together.
I had left the cloudy provinces behind,
I entered the universal, dazzled and desiring.
Soon, enough many from Jassy and Koloshvar,
or Saigon, or Marrakesh would be killed
because they wanted to abolish the customs of their homes.
Soon enough their peers were seizing power
in order to kill in the name of the universal beautiful ideas.
Meanwhile, the city behaved in accordance with its nature,
rustling with throaty laughter in the dark, baking long breads
and pouring wine into clay pitchers,
buying fish, lemon, and garlic at street markets.
Indifferent as it was to honor, and shame, and greatness,
and glory because that had been done already.
and had transformed itself into monuments representing nobody
knows whom into arias hardly audible
and into turns of speech.
Again, I lean on the rough granite of the embankment.
Is if I returned from travels through the underworld
and suddenly saw in the light the reeling wheel
of the seasons where empires have fallen
and those once living are now dead.
There is no capital of the world, either here or anywhere
else.
And the abolished customs are restored to their small fame
and now I know that the time of human generations
is not like the time of the Earth.
As to my heavy sins, I remember one most vividly,
one day walking on a forest path along the stream,
I pushed a rock down onto a water snake,
coiled in the grass.
And what I ever met with-- and what
I have met with in life was the just punishment which reaches,
sooner or later, the breaker of a taboo.