Much work to finish today, heading into the night hours. What better encouragement than this passage from Czesław Miłosz, which I happened across in my research? From Roadside Dog (1998):
“In order to accomplish something, one must dedicate oneself to it totally, so much that our fellow men cannot even imagine such an exclusivity. And that does not mean at all the amount of time consumed. There are also the innumerable emotional subterfuges practiced toward oneself, slow transformations of personality, as if one supreme goal, beyond one’s will and knowledge, pulled in a single direction and organized destiny.”
Author: Cynthia Haven
Cynthia Haven has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, and other publications. Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, La Repubblica, The Kenyon Review, Quarterly Conversation, The Georgia Review, Civilization, and others. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005. Her Czestaw Mitosz: Conversations was published in 2006; Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003; An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czestaw Mitosz was published in 2011 with Ohio University Press / Swallow Press. She is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford. Her biography René Girard, A Life will be published next year.
Join me at twitter: @chaven
View all posts by Cynthia Haven
