CZESLAW MILOSZ
How, one day, walking a forest path along a stream,
I pushed a rock down onto a water snake coiled in the grass.
And what I have met with in life was the just punishment
Which reaches, sooner or later, everyone who breaks a taboo.
175
Though universal ideas long ago lost their appeal for those of
us from Wilno, Warsaw, or Budapest, this does not mean they lost
their appeal everywhere. The young cannibals who, in the name of
inflexible principles, butchered the population of Cambodia had
graduated from the Sorbonne and were simply trying to implement
the philosophic ideas they had learned. As for ourselves, since we
had seen firsthand what one achieves by violating, in the name of
doctrine, local mores (that is, everything which grows slowly,
organically, for centuries), we could only think with horror about the
absurdities haunting the human mind, indifferent as it is to the
repetitive character of blunders.
The poem I cited has a few themes. Its main layer is a
confession, an avowal of grave sin. Not because to kill any living
creature is evil-but because I come from Lithuania where the water
snake was considered holy. Bowls of milk were set out for them at the
thresholds of peasants' huts. People associated them with fertility,
fertility of the soil and of the family, and the sun loved the water
snake. There is a Lithuanian folk saying: "Do not leave a dead
ialtys
on a field; bury it. The sight of a dead
ialtys
would cause the sun to
cry."
Certainly, the student who wrote his French compositions
zealously and read Paul Valery should not have had much in
common with the cult of snakes . And yet the superstitious side of my
nature was and is stronger than the universal ideas, at least on the
level where poetry is born . Though Roman Catholicism inculcated
me with a permanent sense of sin, perhaps another, more primitive,
pagan notion proved to be stronger, that of guilt from violation of
the sacred.
I do not intend to go too far in stressing such provincial
exoticism. One of the strangest regularities to be taken into account
by a historian of literature and art is the affinity binding people who
live at the same time in countries distant from one another. I am
even inclined to believe that the mysterious substance of time itself
determines the similarities of a given historical moment even
between civilizations not in communication. Such a thesis may
appear farfetched; let me therefore limit myself to Europe. There the
mark of a common style binds contemporaneous poets writing in
