Milosz on memory

"To see" means not only to have before one's eyes. It may mean also to preserve in memory. "To see and to describe" may also mean to reconstruct in imagination. A distance achieved, thanks to the mystery of time, must not change events, landscapes, human figures into a tangle of shadows growing paler and paler. On the contrary, it can show them in full light, so that every event, every date becomes expressive and persists as an eternal reminder of human depravity and human greatness. Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever. They can fulfill their duties only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were, and by wrestling the past from fictions and legends.

~from Czeslaw Milosz's Nobel Lecture in 1980.

On Shanghai

"The neon lights of Pudong skyscrapers throb luridly at night, making the "peaceful rise" of China appear, apart from everything else, an occasion for lovers of kitsch. But things are not so peaceful behind the glittering surfaces. The soil is subsiding in newly built-up Pudong; chemical poisons contaminate river waters elsewhere in China; and aggrieved peasants hold hundreds of demonstrations every week.

None of this seems to worry the hundreds of thousands of Chinese cheerfully moving through the shopping malls and the waterfront park in Shanghai. One feels in these great crowds, overhwhelming even to an Indian, not so much life itself, dense, rank or clotting, as the poignancy of the desires of the Chinese people for a better life. It is always a shock to remember the immense suffering China has known in the previous century and it seems petty to begrudge the Chinese shoppers a bit of consumerist self-indulgence."

~From "Steeped in history but striding forward", an article by Pankaj Mishra in the Weekend section of the Financial Times, April 8 and 9, 2006

The only truth?

When someone is honestly 55% right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it's wonderful, it's great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he's 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.

~An old Jew of Galicia