The Eternal Moment

Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish poet and essayist who died in 2004, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Just after the publication of A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry and his memoir, Road-side Dog , I sat down with him in July, 1999, in the cozy, book-lined living room of his cottage on Grizzly Peak Road overlooking the San Francisco Bay shimmering in the distance. After the Cold War he returned in the summers to Krakow, but otherwise lived in Berkeley.