Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that truth. Literature and art refine and beautify, an… - Czesław Miłosz

The Sun by Czeslaw Milosz

All colors come from the sun. And it does not have
Any particular color, for it contains them all.
And the whole Earth is like a poem
While the sun above represents the artist.

Whoever wants to paint the variegated world
Let him never look straight up at the sun
Or he will lose the memory of things he has seen.
Only burning tears will stay in his eyes.

Let him kneel down, lower his face to the grass,
And look at the light reflected by the ground.
There he will find everything we have lost:
The stars and the roses, the dusks and the dawns.

Warsaw, 1943

Not to know. Not to remember.
With this one hope:
That beyond the River Lethe, there is memory, healed.

I am not my own friend.
Time cuts me in two.