When our scornful reason is the judge of others.
Then I went through a sudden initiation.
And her childhood in a city she visited dreaming.
I saw two sins of mine: vanity, gluttony.
That is dictated to me and a few others.
Is not up to us to inquire, we won't read it anyway.
No, it won't happen tomorrow. In five or ten years.
I haven't learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.
A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.
No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians.
Desire will not save the morality of God.
That the world of matter received its shape from diabolic power.
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
Would have tended nevertheless towards the candle's flame.
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.
For one thing is is late. And the truth is laborious.
Miłosz's 1953 book, The Captive Mind, is a study about how intellectuals behave under a repressive regime. Miłosz observed that those who became dissidents were not necessarily those with the strongest minds, but rather those with the weakest stomachs; the mind can rationalize anything, he said, but the stomach can take only so much.