Welcome to “Things Worth Remembering,” in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Cynthia L. Haven, literary scholar and friend of The Free Press, tells the story of a Polish exile, born June 30, 1911, who settled on a peak in California and became one of the great poets of the 20th century.
“How to begin about this California?” Czesław Miłosz asked in 1961. “Something like the Riviera, but on the wild side—all that in spite of the view that I have from my window of five neon-cities.”
The great Polish poet and exile was writing the year after he settled in the Berkeley Hills; his correspondent was the influential postwar historian, translator, and critic Jan Błoński. The letter shows Miłosz’s wonder, alienation, fascination—a range of conflicting reactions to the Golden State.
“The wildness depends on something else,” Miłosz continued—“on the eucalyptus, on the mountains as if they were on the moon, on the desert, on the restless ocean, furiously smashing the cliffs—and emptiness. In a word, grandeur. Or on the foul chemicals above the nearby industrial cities. Rattlesnakes and barking seals.”
The poet’s legendary 1926 cottage atop Grizzly Peak overlooked the Golden Gate Bridge, with a view of the bay opening out to the Pacific. It would become his final home in America. He lived longer on Grizzly Peak than anywhere else—longer than his childhood home in Lithuania, longer even than his time in Poland. This place was his Patmos, a place of revelation and refuge.
Miłosz needed one. He had survived two world wars and the destruction of Warsaw. He had witnessed the Holocaust, and was named a “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem for his efforts to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust.