Chekhov's Mistress
The Poet’s Sphere of Action
“The poet’s sphere of action,” he declared, “if his attitude toward his work is serious, is not the ‘contemporary’—which I take to mean the state of our current knowledge about society, politics, and science—but the real, the stubborn dialogue of man with the concrete reality surrounding him, with this table, with that neighbor, with this time of day: the cultivation of a dwindling capacity for contemplation.”
Zbigniew Herbert, quoted by James Marcus in the opening of Words Without Borders discussion, which is going on now.
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