Raja, I wish I knew

the cause of that malady.

For years I could not accept

the place I was in.

I felt I should be somewhere else.

A city, trees, human voices

lacked the quality of presence.

I would live by the hope of moving on.

Somewhere else there was a city of real presence,

of real trees and voices and friendship and love.

Link, if you wish, my peculiar case

(on the border of schizophrenia)

to the messianic hope

of my civilization.

Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic,

in the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption.

Building in my mind a permanent polis

forever deprived of aimless bustle.

I learned at last to say: this is my home,

here, before the glowing coal of ocean sunsets,

on the shore which faces the shores of your Asia,

in a great republic, moderately corrupt.

Raja, this did not cure me

of my guilt and shame.

A shame of failing to be

what I should have been.

The image of myself

grows gigantic on the wall

and against it

my miserable shadow.

That's how I came to believe

in Original Sin

which is nothing but the first

victory of the ego.

Tormented by my ego, deluded by it

I give you, as you see, a ready argument.

I hear you saying that liberation is possible

and that Socratic wisdom

is identical with your guru's.

No, Raja, I must start from what I am.

I am those monsters which visit my dreams

and reveal to me my hidden essence.

If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever

that man is a healthy creature.

Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness

had to make our agony only more acute.

We needed God loving us in our weakness

and not in the glory of beatitude.

No help, Raja, my part is agony,

struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,

prayer for the Kingdom

and reading Pascal.

Berkeley, 1969

Czeslaw Milosz