In San Francisco we visited Josh and Jill Wait. My sources of pleasure are pretty predictable, so Josh took me to a bookstore off the Berkeley campus. He knew I appreciate Czeslaw Milosz, so he bought me a copy of The Captive Mind.

I haven't read a book like this for a long time: turning pages like a Tolkein adventure. I'm usually a very slow and meticulous reader, but Milosz is special. His message seems to come from somewhere inside of me as I read, so that it's easier to read on than it is to put it down.

The Captive Mind is an apology for free thinking. He portrays the appeal of communistic control in the context of events that give birth to it, and then writes seemingly coincidental incidents that have distanced him from communism. Toward the end of the book, in a hurry and without explaining how it springs the trap of convicted communism, he renders the redeeming image of a family.

"In my wanderings at the beginning of the Second World War, I happened to find myself, for a very short while, in the Soviet Union. I was waiting for a train at a station in one of the large cities of the Ukraine. It was a gigantic station. Its walls were hung with portraits and banners of inexpressible ugliness. A dense crowd dressed in sheepskin coats, uniforms, fur caps, and woolen kerchiefs filled every available space and tracked thick mud over the tiled floor. The marble stairs were covered with sleeping beggars, their bare legs sticking out of their tatters despite the fact that it was freezing. Over them loudspeakers shouted propaganda slogans. As I was passing through the station I suddenly stopped and looked. A peasant family--husband and wife and two children--had settled down by the wall. They were sitting on baskets and bundles. The wife was feeding the younger child; the husband, who had a dark, wrinkled face and a black, drooping mustache was pouring tea out of a kettle into a cup for the older boy. They were whispering to each other in Polish. I gazed at them until I felt moved to the point of tears. What had stopped my steps so suddenly and touched me so profoundly was their difference. This was a human group, an island in a crowd that lacked something proper to humble, ordinary human life. The gesture of a hand pouring tea, the careful, delicate handing of the cup to the child, the worried words I guessed from the movement of their lips, their isolation, their privacy in the midst of the crowd--that is what moved me. For a moment, then, I understood something that quickly slipped from my grasp."