Czeslaw Milosz

My book arrived today. "To Begin Where I am" by Czeslaw Milosz. It came used with an inscription.
"Dear Professor Carol Lambert, Every time I'll go to the office of International Affairs, I'll remember you; when people complement my English, I know deep inside that your courses brought my English skills on a higher level. But now, it's time to thank you for all your help, and wish you a very happy, wonderful time on your retirement. To you and your family My best wishes, Anna Mostowa."

Here is the most amazing excerpt from the book:

SPACE
Imagination, always spatial, points north, south, east and west of some central, privileged place, which is probably a village from one's childhood or native region. As long as a writer lives in his country, the privileged place, by centrifugally enlarging itself, becomes more or less identified with his country as a whole. Exile displaces that center or rather creates two centers. Imagination relates everything in one's surroundings to "over there"-- in my case, somewhere on the European continent. It even continues to designate the four cardinal points, as if I still stood there. At the same time the north, south, east and west are determined by the place in which I write these words.
Imagination tending towards the distant region of one's childhood is typical of literature of nostalgia (a distance in space often serves as a disguise for a Proustian distance in time.) Although quite common, literature of nostalgia is only one among many modes of coping with the estrangement from one's native land. The new point which orients space in respect to iteslf cannot be eliminated, i.e. one cannot abstract from one's physical presence in a definite spot on the Earth. That is why a curious phenomenon appears: the two centers and the two spaces arranged around themselves interfere with each other or--and this is a happy solution--coalesce.