tadeusz_borowski epitome of incomprehensibility To quote (from Barbara Vedder's translation but with a slight correction to the street name): ... Do you know what I am thinking about? I am thinking about Skaryszewska Street. I look at the dark window, my face reflected in the glass, and outside I see the blackness occasionally broken by the sudden flash of the watch-tower searchlight that silhouettes fragments of objects in the dark. I look into the night and I think of Skaryszewska Street. I remember the sky, pale and luminous, and the bombed-out house across the street. I think of how much I longed for your body during those days, and I often smile to myself imagining the consternation after my arrest when they must have found in my room, next to my books and my poems, your perfume and your robe, heavy and red like the brocades in Velazquez' paintings. I think of how very mature you were; what devotion and - forgive me if I say it now - what selflessness you brought to our love, how graciously you used to walk into my life which offered you nothing but a single room without plumbing, evenings with cold tea, a few wilting flowers, a dog that was always painfully gnawing at your shoes, and a paraffin lamp. I think about these things and smile condescendingly when people speak to me of morality, of law, of tradition, of obligation... Or when they discard all tenderness and softness and, shaking their their fists, proclaim this the age of toughness. I smile and think that one human being must always be discovering another - through love. And that this is the most important thing on earth, and the most lasting. ... 240501 ... e_o_i edits *the dog was "playfully" gnawing, not "painfully." Pah. But knowing a bit of dogs, it could have been both. 240501 ... e_o_i About his life, it was short and miserable but not without some space for art. I wrote about him in one of my classes this spring, so this is mostly from memory (even if recent, inaccuracies may intrude): He started writing poetry as a student at an underground university: small classes, meeting in secret during Poland's Nazi occupation. Then he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. He had relatively better conditions than some prisoners - relatively. He wasn't Jewish, so he got better jobs; he could also get food packages in the mail. So he survived and had some success with his short stories he published soon after, and he married his fiancée who'd also survived there. In a few years, he grew depressed. Understandable, with all he'd gone through; plus he seemed disillusioned with the communist government he'd agreed to work for earlier. He felt that doing journalism rather than stories or poetry was stifling his creativity, and he killed himself before he was thirty. But at least he left behind something worth reading. That's not to say that people who live longer and calmer lives without producing well-known art are wasting their time - certainly you can do great things without any recognition. And it was partly happenstance that these works got distributed and published in other languages. I'm glad they did, so that I can have things like the quote above. 241119 what's it to you? who go blather from