How do you regard odd conjunctions that pop up in your life, which seem to hint at a meaningful pattern? My inclination is to treat them with respect, even as I recognize the danger of imposing patterns on unruly experience. It's not only conspiracy theorists who are subject to that malady: all of us are vulnerable.

Several times quite recently, in quick succession, in different contexts, none of them strictly literary, Czeslaw Milosz has come to mind. On the surface, there's nothing terribly surprising about this. Milosz (1911-2004), who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, is famous. His centenary, designated as the "Milosz Year," will be celebrated in Poland and around the world. And he is among a handful of writers who, in a lifetime of reading, have made the deepest impression on me. That he should come to mind—especially now, as I write, on the eve of his centenary—is not only unremarkable; it is entirely predictable.

True, true, but this cluster of instances in which he has surfaced has followed a particular pattern. I mention Milosz, and my conversation partners—whether in person or via email—immediately distance themselves in one way or another, whether explicitly or between the lines. Ah! One of those esoteric modern writers, with an odd name, too. Maybe very good for those who fancy such stuff, literary epicureans, but not for me, and not for most people.

Much as I have delighted in Milosz's work, I have no desire to force his books on anyone. But I think that many readers, including many who are far from the groves of academe, might be surprised if they kept a copy of his New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 handy for a few months. (And perhaps a new edition will be issued to mark the centenary.) His life, the historical background of his work, the many remarkable books of prose that fill out the Milosz shelf—there is plenty of time for all of that. Best to start with the poems.

Joseph Brodsky, himself a Nobel Prize-winning poet, said, "I have no hesitation whatsoever in stating that Czeslaw Milosz is one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest." Well and good, and a judgment widely shared. But many readers coming to Milosz for the first time will be surprised to learn that the poet of whom this is said was a Christian, a decidedly unorthodox Roman Catholic, one who expressed ecstatic praise and perennial doubt, eschatological hope and a questioning wonderment.

Please don't misunderstand me. In the churches I attended as a boy, there was a tendency to highlight prominent figures (not poets, however) with the declaration "and he's a Christian!" (Yes, almost always "he.") The inadvertent effect was to suggest a certain defensiveness. Still, given the standard narrative of "the modern mind," whether in the form that was current when I started college a generation ago or in the version one is most likely to encounter today, the work of Czeslaw Milosz offers an extraordinarily powerful counter-testimony.

So much so, in fact, that many who admire Milosz's poetry find his Christianity hard to swallow. "In a way," Joseph Brodsky wrote, in the 1978 commendation of Milosz from which I quoted above, "what this poet preaches is an awfully sober version of stoicism which does not ignore reality, however absurd and horrendous, but accepts it as a new norm which a human being has to absorb without giving up any of his fairly compromised values." Brodsky was a brilliant reader, but his statement here, as so often, is a mixture of orphic insight and sheer wrong-headedness. Insofar as Milosz preached anything, it was a faith in "the restoration of all things," in which not only individual suffering and loss but also time itself will be redeemed. It would be hard to imagine an outlook further from stoicism. Here is the beginning of Milosz's poem "Readings," written in 1969 in Berkeley, California, where he lived for many years:

You asked me what is the good of reading the Gospels in Greek.
I answer that it is proper that we move our finger
Along letters more enduring than those carved in stone,
And that, slowly pronouncing each syllable,
We discover the true dignity of speech.

One product of such reading was a handful of translations from the Bible into Polish, begun in the 1970s, including the Book of Job, the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, and the Gospel of Mark. Milosz sought, he said, to avoid both archaism and the debased familiarity endemic to modern Bible translations.

Here, in its entirety, is Milosz's poem "Proof," written in 1975:

And yet you experienced the flames of Hell.
You can even say what they are like: real,
Ending in sharp hooks so that they tear up flesh
Piece by piece, to the bone. You walked in the street
And it was going on: the lashing and bleeding.
You remember, therefore you have no doubt: there is a Hell for certain.

And here is a passage from "Bells in Winter," the seventh and concluding section of a sequence of poems entitled "From the Rising of the Sun." The poet has been recalling a street opposite the university in Vilna, called Literary Lane, and the room he rented there, heated by a stove "that used to devour logs brought from the hallway / By the old servant woman, Lisabeth":

There is, it would seem, no reason
(For I have departed to a land more distant
Than one that can be reached by roads leading through woods and mountains)
To bring that room back here.

Yet I belong to those who believe in apokatastasis.
The word promises reverse movement,
Not the one that was set in katastasis,
And appears in the Acts, 3, 21.

It means: restoration. So believed: St. Gregory of Nyssa,
Johannes Scotus Erigena, Ruysbroeck, and William Blake.

For me, therefore, everything has a double existence.
Both in time and when time shall be no more.

From the beginning to the end of his exceptionally long career, you will find Milosz registering the strangeness of our existence. (And if we are nothing but complicated arrangements of matter, why should we feel like strangers in a strange land?) Here is a section of one of my favorites among his poems, "Throughout Our Lands," written in 1961:

If I had to tell what the world is for me
I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole
and place him in a theater seat one evening
and, bringing my ear close to his humid snout,
would listen to what he says about the spotlights,
sounds of the music and movements of the dance.

And here, finally, is the beginning of "Late Ripeness," which concludes his collected poems:

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
Ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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