Constellation of Genius: Miłosz, Camus, Einstein, and Weil
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
—Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
Beavers were hunted to near extinction in Europe by mid-century, but in America, they thrived. For the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, they would have held an obvious fascination. They are muscular animals; they can carry their own substantial weight when building a lodge, which can total three tons. And though they are, to all appearances, dumpy, heavy rodents, when they plunge into water, they are as sleek as otters. One of these odd creatures moved Miłosz to make perhaps the most significant decision of his life, though he would see that only in retrospect. He would write about it years later in France—but he was far from Paris on that day, on one early winter morning before dawn in the winter of 1948-49.
The love and reverence many Californians feel for the Pacific is, in much of the world, directed towards rivers. Certainly, it was so with Miłosz. He had been drawn to rivers since his childhood, on the Niewiaża river, in Lithuania’s Šeteniai, and now he was unimaginably far away, in the land where natura ruled supreme. The Pacific Ocean that was his destined home was terrifying and alien, but this river was manageable.
Miłosz was waiting to catch sight of the beavers. He paddled a rowboat in a Pennsylvania river before dawn. He was cautious; any slight noise might startle the creatures. He contemplated the disappearance of the world of esse, the world of essences and eternal truths, and he considered jumping a bigger ship than the small boat he was rowing—in short, defecting from the Stalinist government of Poland.
He was not alone. He would later write that the vast majority of diplomats saw their presence in America as a chance to defect—only a few returned to Poland. The trend accelerated as Stalin consolidated power. Except for Miłosz, who characteristically resisted. He said, “To return to Stalinist Poland would have been the most blatant nonsense. And yet, though it sounds ridiculous to say this, good little Czeslaw simply could not renounce his loyalty.”[1]
To go or to stay? His wife Janka was terrified by Europe’s instability and the encroaching communism creeping westward. She was urging, begging him to stay in the U.S. The playwright Thornton Wilder, a protector and friend to the family, promised to set him up on a farm where he could stay and write poems—the world of nature, of esse, had always been a lure for him. Such a move would of course cut him off from his first love, his Mother Tongue.
The Cold War was already taking shape, and the Miłosz family was under suspicion and observation from both sides. His son Anthony Miłosz told me, “We were all destined for examination. We were constantly watched, spied upon. You just felt it.” People who had “no business knowing something about you,” nevertheless knew. Miłosz’s wife Janka became fatally ill during those years. His younger son would go mad. According to Anthony, Peter’s paranoia “had an element of this spying,” adding “It’s fair to say it drove him to insanity.”
Miłosz was tormented. He drove to Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey, to talk to Albert Einstein, an advisor, friend, and perhaps a father figure as well. He wanted the wise man’s words. His dilemma: to defect was to make a lasting break with his Mother Tongue and live in an alien land, a tragedy for a poet. To stay with Poland was to risk censorship and arrest. Possibly more. But the genius physicist who had left the increasingly dangerous Europe for America in 1933 told the Polish poet that the life of exile was hard, and advised him, “You had better stick to your country.” And so he did. Until he could not. And that is a story in itself.
New Poetry for a New World
The postwar world was coalescing, moving national borders and shifting populations, but a smaller and less-heralded event changed the world in a different way. It was the year that Ocalenie [Salvation] was published at war’s end; Miłosz’s remarkable poetry collection brought the wind of change with it, considering the war, the Holocaust, and as always, his sense of wonder at the world. In 2024, the Polish world celebrated the book’s eightieth birthday, with a brand-new edition from Znak Publishers. Miłosz was already an important young poet by the war’s end, but this book marks the moment he became a great one. A welter of landmark poems that have stayed in public memory ever since burst upon the world with its publication: “Encounter,” “Campo dei Fiori,” “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” the poems of “The World” sequence, among them.
And of course, the devastating poem from 1945, “Dedication,” a principled and heartrending cry to a young friend who was killed on the ruins of a demolished Warsaw, and a defense of the poet’s mission:
What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.
( . . . the last word in Polish, of course, repeats the book’s title, ocalenie.)
For Miłosz, Ocalenie is a self-defining statement, echoing the full-throated lamentation of the wieszcz, a distinctly Polish conception of the poet as prophet, who can speak for his time, who brings the tribe together and defines its future. He was following in the big footsteps of Polish poets going all the way back to Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s Ur-poet who declared “Poland is the Christ of the nations,” a prophesy of redemption and triumph that figured in the election of a Polish pope in 1978 and the Solidarity movement of the 1980s. Others enriched this deeply Polish strain—Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, Cyprian Norwid, and Stanisław Wyspiański. But this poem was written in the aftermath of one of the most murderous wars in history—salvation was not only a spiritual question, but a matter of survival.
Ocalenie is a very carefully composed book—more so than, say, Eliot’s Wasteland. Yet comparatively little has been said about it, given its importance in Miłosz’s oeuvre and its importance to world literature. It was republished for the first time in 2024. That is very important.
Miłosz would drop the oracular tone in America, where it was unfashionable to strike such a pose; to an American ear it sounds pretentious and bombastic. Perhaps that is why the English edition of Ocalenie moves the dedication to the back of the volume—an odd placement for a dedication, but a right choice for the times. He was in America now, and had learned that the oracular tone was viewed as pompous, sometimes even comically so, against the stripped down, get-to-the-point American vernacular.
There are many kinds of ocalenie and its transferal into English is tricky, a mood and a movement, a stance of resistance. The 1945 book that ushered in postwar Poland had many meanings. The first translators of the 1973 American edition with Seabury Press called it Rescue. However, Miłosz’s first translator into English, the Canadian diplomat and Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott, scoffed at the translation. “Rescue” he said, “is when you get a cat down from a tree.” “Ocalenie” has more spiritual intimations; a closer translation is “Salvation.” So it may not be too much of a reach to consider ocalenie in the wider sense. It was a turning point—in a new era, in a new world.
1945 would be important in yet another way: Miłosz was appointed cultural attaché for the Polish government, serving first in New York City and then Washington. It was a lucky position that allowed him the freedom to travel and the chance to familiarize himself with the nation that was already one option for his future . . . but he was always under government eye, always observed by spies.
***
Following his 1951 defection from Communist Poland, Miłosz would live four decades of his life in exile, depending on how you count them. His son Anthony ironically described the Polish perspective of what happened to his father this way: “He was an important young poet, then something bad happened, he went to America and sulked for a while, and then he finally came back to all of you,” that is, he finally was able to rejoin the Polish people, beginning in the 1980s.
There was so much more to it than that, however, as Anthony Miłosz knew. The “bad” thing that happened was a world war, leaving half of Europe under the Soviet thumb—a brutal ordeal for the Polish people. He finally returned to Poland full-time in 2000, after seven years commuting between Berkeley and Poland, and he acquired an apartment in the city—but the American years are pretty much a lacuna for Poles, though he lived more of his life in the United States than anywhere else. He produced a miraculous tsunami of poetry, essays, and novels during his American years. When he was informed of his 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, he greeted reporters on his doorstep in Berkeley, not Kraków.
It has been more than two decades since his death in 2004. He told me in 2000: “It seems to me every poet after death goes through a purgatory, so to say. So, he must go through that moment of revision after death.”
We are overdue for a revival and here’s why: Each new book about Miłosz deepens our humanity and provides another weapon in the poet’s lifelong war of memory against oblivion, his rejection of narrow-mindedness, ignorance, and tribalism. The capaciousness of his mind, the depth of his understanding, recommends him to the widest possible readership. Two recent books have shed light on his American years: Peter Dale Scott has published an erudite and comprehensive study, Ecstatic Pessimist: Czeslaw Miłosz, Poet of Catastrophe and Hope, a record of the collaboration that began in 1960; and then there is mine: Czesław Miłosz: A California Life, in 2021. I am grateful for Znak creating a Polish edition of the book, as I had always envisioned it would have.
An Ink-stained Kitchen Table in Paris
I said that each new book deepens our humanity and is a weapon in the war of memory and oblivion; I should say that the same is on a budget scale with each poem; each is like a little bomb exploding our expectations and clichés. I would like to talk about one of those poems now. The poem was written during the condensed and tormented time we have been considering—the time of the beavers, the time of high-risk, irreversible decisions, and choices that could be fatal. And in another sense, the poem is a souvenir of friendship, a seemingly unlikely friendship, between three Nobel Prize-winners. Czesław Miłosz was one of them. The others were Albert Camus and Albert Einstein. The coded we discuss below—written in a panicky, coded era—records the terror of this time.
The groundbreaking Princeton physicist had befriended and advised Miłosz, hence the gratitude expressed by a poem dedicated to him. In a 1950 letter to Anna Kowalska, Miłosz considered publishing the poem “Do Einsteina” [To Einstein] in the journal Zeszytie Wrocławskie.[2] It never happened, so the first long portion of the poem was translated by Miłosz and published in Year of the Hunter in 1995. It was published in Polish in 2004 and will appear next year in its entirety in English with the publication of Miłosz’s Washington and New York poems, written during his years as a diplomat, translated by Robert Hass and David Frick as Poet of the New World: Poems, 1946-1953.
Einstein was not always the beloved icon he has since become. He courted controversy. He had called for the creation of a world government to control atomic energy. According to Miłosz, “he had displayed the extraordinary lack of tact to speak in the defense of all mankind, leaving no possibility for a division into bad men and good men, i.e., for demonology, which was after all what really mattered.”[3] But Einstein was barred from making his pitch for fear of Russian reaction. Said Miłosz: “I was grateful for his melancholy smile, proof that he understood, that he did not condemn people who are powerless in spite of their good will.” Remembering his friend and fellow exile, Miłosz reminisced that “everything about him appealed to my father complex, my yearning for a protector and leader. I felt remorseful towards him because of the disgrace of what happened during the first Congress in Defense of Peace, held in Wrocław, Poland, in 1948.”[4]
The world thought a danger had passed, but it had not. The world forever lives with the knowledge that it can destroy itself. Its horrors hover over the future of the human race and continue to endanger generations, including those not yet born. Nuclear power . . . the moment that showed the worst of us.
While nations wrangled, a separate peace reigned in a corner in Paris, in an apartment overlooking Luxembourg Gardens, where a brilliant circle of friendship gathered, uniting the living and the dead—Einstein, Camus, and Miłosz—with an invisible fourth, Simone Weil, who influenced them all. The traces are found in Miłosz’s poetry. Weil had perished in 1943, of course, but her spirit was with them, and the matriarch, Salomea Weil, or “Selma” as she was known, welcomed her guests. This small group of people, living or not, give us a hope that runs deeper than international conferences and extends beyond death.
Miłosz said that life in Europe would be impossible, “if it were not for the existence of some subterranean rivers”—those rivers again—that only once in a while reveal their presence.” He continued:
Access to them is difficult, and the initiated do not like to show others the paths leading to them; these are rivers of jealously guarded hope . . . those who quench their thirst at these waters recognize each other instantly with the first words spoken. Occasionally one of these rivers comes to the surface, and we give it the name of a person. One such person is Simone Weil.[5]
How much did Weil sway Miłosz? “Distance is the soul of beauty,” Miłosz said in his Nobel address. Weil’s words clearly inspired his short poem, “Love.” The translation by Robert Hass begins this way: “Love means to learn to look at yourself / The way one looks at distant things.”
That is one small example but there are more. The influence and thinking of this ascetic philosopher permeates the work and life of this sensual and omnivorous poet and thinker.
What brought Czeslaw Miłosz and Albert Camus together? Both knew firsthand how idealism can turn to slaughter. Camus gave early warning of the Stalinist camps in what Miłosz would later call “the other Europe,” east of the Danube, and so he was ostracized by the up-to-date thinkers of the pro-Stalin café society. Miłosz watched with growing terror as political tyranny swallowed nations. He would later say:
I feel that the greatest asset that my part of Europe received in the history of the twentieth century, the privilege of our being the avant-garde of inhumanity, is that the question of true and false, good and evil, became operative again. Namely, good and evil, true and false have not been discovered through philosophical discourse, but empirically, like the taste of bread.[6]
That understanding alone would put him miles ahead of his colleagues who had succumbed to the au courant Stalinism of Paris.
While Miłosz was furiously, relentlessly writing The Captive Mind in Maisons-Laffitte, Albert Camus published The Rebel in 1951. In it, he renounced the revolutionary violence preached by Paris’s bien pensants. He was personally horrified by what the West was then learning of the Soviet camps, even as it rejected and denied what it was beginning to hear. Camus’s break with Sartre was public and nasty.
The contrast with the modest ink-stained table with a view to Luxembourg Gardens is startlingly sharp, morally clear. Almost a century later, we can still join them in spirit, exploring that meeting of minds between Einstein, Camus, and Miłosz, all under the star of Simone Weil. One friend saw her as on a sort of metaphysical threshold, completely isolated from her contemporaries: “To those of her generation (e.g. Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir), her asceticism appeared to be an absurd form of neurosis. Camus [by contrast] was attracted to her by his own moral passion.”[7]
Miłosz and Camus became friends, and both fell under the spell of this stranger among them, the one who could not join them, the one they would encounter only in thought. As Camus would say of his muse in a press conference before accepting the Nobel Prize: “There are dead people who are closer to us than many of the living.” So they would speak of the young visionary French philosopher from the École Normale.
What fortunate fruit would this nest of associations bear? For one, Miłosz translated Weil’s Selected Works into Polish in 1958, fifteen years after her death, when her work was still obscure and unknown. His accomplishment has been largely underestimated and overlooked. Yet that achievement would bear magnificent fruit a decade later, in the 1960s, with a new openness to her work. She perished alone, a victim of her self-imposed discipline of poverty and humility; now she is a world legacy.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the pattern would be a trademark of Miłosz’s life in exile: selfless service to the work of others—his translating Anna Swir comes to mind, so does his recording of Aleksandr Wat’s memoirs. More: The History of Polish Literature and the Postwar Polish Poetry. He inspired the same selflessness in others—one thinks of Robert Hass, an eminent and awarded poet who gave years of his life translating a poet he considered the greater master. It has been said, and it is true, that you cannot talk to Bob Hass for half an hour without the conversation turning to Miłosz.
Miłosz was keenly aware of this “spiritual contagion,” a “good infection.” Notre Dame Prof. Artur Sebastian Rosman wrote,
Violent in her judgments and uncompromising, Simone Weil was, at least by temperament, an Albigensian, a Cathar; this is the key to her thought. She drew extreme conclusions from the Platonic in Christianity. Here we touch upon hidden ties between her and Albert Camus. The first work by Camus was his university dissertation on St. Augustine. Camus, in my opinion, was also a Cathar, a pure one, [“Cathar” from Gr. katharos, pure] and if he rejected God it was out of love for God because he was not able to justify him. The last novel written by Camus, The Fall, is nothing else but a treatise on Grace—absent grace—though it is also a satire: the talkative hero, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who reverses the words of Jesus and instead of “Judge not and ye shall not be judged”: gives the advice “Judge, and ye shall not be judged,” could be, I have reason to suspect, Jean-Paul Sartre.[8]
The Nobel laureate Albert Camus would seem to be the odd man out, but not so: the existentialist could not, try as he might, get beyond good and evil. The witty Rosman again:
Most of his literary works collapse under the weight of trying to cover up their origins in, and direct debts to, classical Christian doctrines, especially Original Sin. It is as if he keeps trying to roll a rock to seal off the tomb, only to find it rolled away every darn morning. Just look at the plots of The Fall, The Plague, and The First Man and tell me God shouldn’t sue for copyright infringement upon the biblical narrative.[9]
Camus sought a way out of the darkness, as he faced the hopelessness of that place and that era, in a future without God. Hence, he created and edited a book series called Hope (Espoir) for Gallimard. Its goal: to see if “one can get out of nihilism.” Simone Weil’s work Gravity and Grace appeared for the first time in his journal. “In his tentative and incomplete fashion, he was feeling his way towards acceptance of a kind of natural law and an affirmation of universal human nature.”[10]
When Camus’s 1957 Nobel was announced, he went immediately to see Madame Weil and flee the press, and to sit again among Weil’s unpublished manuscripts, at the ink-stained table where Simone had labored. He asked Selma Weil for a photo of her daughter to take with him to the Nobel ceremonies. When asked by a reporter in Stockholm which writers he felt closest to, Camus named the poet Réné Char and Simone Weil. When the journalist observed that Weil was dead, Camus replied that death never comes between true friends. He famously called her the only great spirit of our time.
An atheist? Not exactly. Miłosz said Camus was definitely a “Manichaean.” A chance meeting led to Camus’s short friendship with a Methodist minister at the American Church in Paris.[11] The minister left an account that the two talked about Christianity constantly, and at their last meeting, Camus asked to be re-baptized in private. The minister suggested they think it over a bit, but Camus died in a car accident in 1960 before they could meet again.
***
Meanwhile, Miłosz used his time as a diplomat strategically and well. In New York, he met with America’s leading poets and writers and forged an important friendship with the playwright Thornton Wilder, who would shield the poet’s family in the years to come, trying to persuade him to jump ship and settle in America. But still he was tortured by his indecision.
Einstein spoke from experience, but experience of a different kind. Einstein seemed to have little firsthand notion of what was happening in Eastern Europe, and did not know what Miłosz would be facing if he went back. Possible arrest, censorship, persecution, even death. So Miłosz left the scientist’s prim white colonial house on Mercer Street realizing that he had to deal with his crisis alone. In Franaszek’s biography this sounds like a disappointing moment. It may have been the opposite.
There is one important and often overlooked souvenir of this alignment of genius—a poem that was partially published in 1995’s Year of the Hunter, in Miłosz’s own translation. It did not appear in his subsequent collections, nor in the American Collected of 2001. It is a memento of the tortured years of indecision, his postwar life in alien America:
This New Jerusalem of the old Puritans,
Their dream realized however much the wrong way,
Is for me an empty stage set, and a burden,
As if I wished to cry out in my sleep, and can’t.
There was much in these times to make one cry out in the middle of the night The war was over, but a different war was beginning in what Miłosz called “the other Europe.” For Miłosz, the indecision to stay, or to defect, was torture. No wonder he “wished to cry out . . . and can’t.”
This poem is dated 1948-49, the winter of the beavers on the river. The separation from his family, his wife’s difficult, life-threatening pregnancies, the constant spying by both sides of the Cold War . . . Anthony Miłosz says that is what the paranoia and madness that afflicted his son Peter. The family was exposed to strangers whose motives they could not trust or evaluate.
It all comes together in this remarkable poem. I spent long afternoons and several phone calls discussing it with translator Scott, now in his nineties, and am indebted to him for bringing it to my attention. The Einstein poem is a show-stopper, and we will be parsing it, on both sides of the Atlantic, for years to come. It is a cryptic poem that concludes with a mysteriously elliptical question:
Are we in fact the enemies of the species,
Who wish to change human beings by force
Into angels of pure intellect, to tear from the depths
That hated spark for which Prometheus was tortured.
Prometheus, one of the Titans, stole fire from the gods—and was punished cruelly for it, chained to a rock with an eagle arriving daily to nibble at his liver. But his suffering was the making of mankind. Miłosz reminds us that the promethean fire is a two-edged sword, bringing technology and knowledge to mankind, but also the atomic bomb—the very dilemma that Miłosz warned about in his lectures and writings. Perhaps that is why it is a “hated spark.”
The myth of Prometheus is not simply an archaic myth of punishment and revenge—it is a story rooted in gratitude to the Titan. The “hated spark” Miłosz writes about is more than the gift of fire that warms our winters and cooks our food. It embraces human intelligence and creativity, which is born in this very disobedience. The gifts of Prometheus are what make us human. And the myth that is created, the work of a poet or storyteller, is more than a warning. It is a celebration of the hero who brought our humanity to us, who made it conscious to us. Prometheus was the lover of mankind, its ally. And for that he was tortured mercilessly.
The world will not say “thank you.” In fact, we spurn the Promethean gifts on a daily basis. We wish to reject the gift and the responsibility: “to tear from the depths / That hated spark for which Prometheus was tortured.” For Miłosz his task was “the words he could not speak but must,” as he says in the poem.
The poet is a creator but stands apart from Creation—the world of esse. Prometheus takes action and takes punishment—a divinely ordained exile. Better to speak the words that are pressing against his lips, as he says, “As if I wished to cry out in my sleep, and can’t.” The words would pour out a few years later into Captive Mind, as he was drinking and smoking and pacing his hideaway in Maisons-Laffitte, fearful for his life.
Did Miłosz see himself, as a sort of Prometheus, bringing us his perishable gift, his own offering to mankind? Was artistry enough? Miłosz, the creator of poems, the creator of visions and worlds . . . was he also the victim of the Promethean curse? Was the exile, the death of two wives, the madness of his son, the flip side of Prometheus’s gift? He often prayed for a release from his crosses.
The Greeks honored Prometheus. They celebrated technē, the arts and skills that brought us human culture, the gifts of civilization. The story is not a cautionary tale—it is an act of courage that separated us from the animals. Like many myths, the hero is destroyed and yet lives. The stories we tell ourselves matter, and how we tell them matters—and that is true of Prometheus, who can be seen as the rebellion against the gods, or as the one who brought our humanity, who, by his very act of disobedience, made us conscious of our consciousness.
And one rebellion gives birth to another: our hostility to culture, civilization, technology, is an extension of Prometheus’s defiance. Prometheus rebelled, and now we too rebel against the very genius that brought us life. That is the newer spin. We rebel against our arts, cities, literature, against the very notion of progress. We fantasize returning to the wild, though we could not live without a microwave.
The spirit of Prometheus connects us with all of our gifts, and all that they exact from us. He links us with our rise from the dust and our return to it. The gifts that technē brings and the costs that all these gifts exact rise up before us. Prometheus connects our high-tech present with our primitive past, and reminds us of the difficult balance between both.
What do we owe mankind, and what does it owe us? How does the poet live out his own gift? Miłosz questioned the role of the poet, to contemplate esse, to stand apart from the roar of time. What was the role of the poet in time? What did he owe history?
***
Toward the end of his life, Miłosz described “second space,” a dimension outside our usual space and time, here and now. Let us hope it is a dimension outside wars and domination as well.
From a poem called “Powers,” one of the poems in Second Space, the collection that came out the year of his death:
Though of weak faith, I believe in forces and powers,
Who crowd every inch of the air.
Perhaps his sense of second space expanded his horizons beyond the loneliness and limitations of the exile. Perhaps “second space” was his final home. “I do not feel displaced,” he said in a 1982 New York Times interview. “I feel all the tragedies and excitements of this time, which is a very cosmopolitan time. Let us not create myths about exile if all of us, we’re exiles—hah? What’s good in America is that you have the feeling of universal exile.” What came out of these associations, the anguish of these years? This poem to Albert Einstein, for one thing. The thick Selected Works of Weil, for another. We should not underestimate either.
We are a long way from that river in Pennsylvania more than eighty years ago, waiting for the beavers before dawn. On the Pennsylvania river, his ruminations about time, history, and civilizations were interrupted by a determined splat! The beaver caught the human scent and plunged back into the dark river, interrupting the poet’s thoughts. “The memory grows larger than my life,”[12] Miłosz recalled. The poet had wanted to pluck the eternal moment from nature—that was Thornton Wilder’s offer of a farm in the countryside, at the moment he was considering defection. But in the end, he votes for Prometheus. He gets mixed into the movement that is history.
In short, he defected.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay was the “Miłosz Lecture” for the 2024 Kraków Literary Festival. The episode of the beavers and the river was adapted from Cynthia L. Haven, Czesław Miłosz: A California Life (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2021; Kraków: Znak, 2024).
[1] Miłosz, Year of the Hunter, 121.
[2] Ewa Kołodziejczyk, Czesław Miłosz in Postwar America, p. 45, fn 128.
[3] Czesław Miłosz, Proud to be a Mammal: Essays on War, Faith and Memory (London: Penguin,2010), trans. Catherine Leach, Bogdana Carpenter, and Madeline G. Levine, 185.
[4] Miłosz, Proud to be a Mammal, xx.
[5] Miłosz, To Begin Where I Am, 199.
[6] Nathan Gardels, “The Withering Away of Society: An Interview with Czesław Miłosz, in Czesław Miłosz: Conversations (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 72.
[7] Gabriella Fiori, “The Story of a Friendship.”
[8] Artur Rosman, “Understanding Simone Weil’s Quest for the Absolute,” Cosmos the in Lost, June 24, 2013.
[9] Artur Rosman, “Famous Atheists Who Weren’t Atheists 2: The Christianity of Camus,” Cosmos the in Lost, June 30, 2013.
[10] Robert Royal, “Camus Between God and Nothing,” First Things, January 2014.
[11] Recounted in Howard Mumma, Albert Camus & the Minister (Paraclete Press, 2000).
[12] Treatise on Poetry, p. 45.