The legacy of losd …

… Adam Zagajewski's Letters of Loss | The Weekly Standard. (Hat tip, Cynthia Haven.)

Zagajewski’s recent essay collection Slight Exaggeration, a long meditation about exile, displacement, dispossession, memory, and literature, is extracted from a life that seems penciled into a historical moment—that is, postwar Central Europe. However, he makes the particular universal when he writes: “Loss alone touches us deeply, permanence goes unremarked . . . . The displaced live in times of peace but carry the war within them. Everyone else has long forgotten, but not they.” The displaced “carry secrets, they bear a loss, an abyss, a longing within them,” he repeats. “The displaced may suffer, but a certain secret order governs their lives.”