From Czesław Miłosz’s Unattainable Earth translated by the author and Robert Hass.
This very humble gesture — friable.
Where does humility come from? From sitting down and putting little signs on paper with the hope of expressing something. I am able to spend whole days on the occupation, but as soon as I finish I see that I did not express anything.
And the gesture is reinscribed at the end of the book, [p. 141]
To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.
Note carefully that meaning is not there. There is order, rhythm, form but not meaning. Or expression.
And so for day 2494
11.10.2013