WEBVTT

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I'm going to read
you two poems, which

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seem to me to relate to this
idea that I'm trying to present

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in this paragraph about
a certain type of writer

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and about what is coming
in the next century.

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And in a way what
is nature actually

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the century that we have
just finished living through

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and how we were going to have
to alter our ideas of what

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that century was.

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The first is a poem
by Czesław Miłosz,

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"Bypassing Rue
Descartes," and this

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is a poem about Miłosz coming as
a young man from the provinces

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of Wilno to Paris.

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And what he found
and you have when

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you think about Paris
in this one piece,

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what do we think about?

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You think about Hemingway?

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You think about Picasso?

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We think about the art?

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The expatriates.

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But there was another
Paris though, it

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was the Paris of
Ho Chi Minh, it is

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a Paris of Deng
Xiaoping, who said

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he found in Paris a love of
croissants and communism.

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And Miłosz-- and
it was these people

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who came from the provinces,
from these small countries

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around the globe.

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So this is about Miłosz's
experience of that.

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"Bypassing Rue Descartes.

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Bypassing rue Descartes, I
descended towards the Seine,

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shy, a traveler, a young
barbarian just come

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to the capital of the world.

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We were many, from Jassy and
Koloshvar, Wilno and Bucharest,

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Saigon, and Marrakesh,
ashamed to remember

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the customs of our homes about
which nobody here should ever

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be told.

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The clapping for
servants, barefooted girls

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hurry in, dividing food with
incantations, choral prayers

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recited by master and
household together.

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I had left the cloudy
provinces behind,

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I entered the universal,
dazzled and desiring.

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Soon, enough many from
Jassy and Koloshvar,

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or Saigon, or Marrakesh
would be killed

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because they wanted to abolish
the customs of their homes.

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Soon enough their peers
were seizing power

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in order to kill in the name of
the universal beautiful ideas.

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Meanwhile, the city behaved
in accordance with its nature,

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rustling with throaty laughter
in the dark, baking long breads

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and pouring wine
into clay pitchers,

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buying fish, lemon, and
garlic at street markets.

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Indifferent as it was to honor,
and shame, and greatness,

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and glory because that
had been done already.

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and had transformed itself into
monuments representing nobody

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knows whom into
arias hardly audible

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and into turns of speech.

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Again, I lean on the rough
granite of the embankment.

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Is if I returned from travels
through the underworld

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and suddenly saw in the
light the reeling wheel

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of the seasons where
empires have fallen

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and those once
living are now dead.

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There is no capital of the
world, either here or anywhere

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else.

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And the abolished customs are
restored to their small fame

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and now I know that the
time of human generations

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is not like the
time of the Earth.

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As to my heavy sins, I
remember one most vividly,

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one day walking on a forest
path along the stream,

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I pushed a rock down
onto a water snake,

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coiled in the grass.

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And what I ever
met with-- and what

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I have met with in life was the
just punishment which reaches,

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sooner or later, the
breaker of a taboo.

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