Quote preview background for Czeslaw Milosz
Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet__ mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason.
Czeslaw Milosz
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Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet__ mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason.

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