Czesław Miłosz's "Road-side Dog"

Big Frank has been reading Milosz's "Road-side Dog", a wonderful small book of poetry, essays, aphorisms and anecdotes. Milosz starts the book with a couple of quotations taken from Lew Shestov, and this reveals much of where he is going with language and the mystery of life, or perhaps the deception of life:

"Perhaps truth by its nature makes communication between people impossible, in any case communication by the intermediary of words. Every one may know it for himself, but in order to enter into relations with his fellowmen he must renounce truth and adopt any conventional lie."
---- Lew Shestov, Penultimate Words, 1911

Here are some excerpts from the book:

The Last Judgment
"The consequences of our actions, Completely unknown, for every one of them enters into a multifaceted relation with circumstance and with the actions of others. An absolutely efficient computer could show us, with a correction for accidents, of course, for how else to calculate the direction taken by a billiard ball after it strikes another? Besides, it is permissible to maintain that nothing happens by accident. Be that as it may, standing before a perfectly computerized balanced sheet of our lives (The Last Judgment), we must be astonished: Can it be that I am responsible for so much evil done against my will? And here, on the other scale, so much good I did not intend and of which I was not aware?"

Meanwhile and Made-Believe
"To get up in the morning and go to work, to be bound to people by the ties of love, friendship, or opposition--and all the time to realize that it was only meanwhile and make-believe. . .

He did not regard kindly this affliction of his. He agreed with the opinion that he should be here--entirely present, in a given place and moment, attentive to the needs of those who were close to him and fulfilling their expectations. To think that they were just for meanwhile and that he practiced with them a make-believe was to harm them, yet he was unable to renounce the thought that, really, he had not time for life with them."

"What is not said, tends to nonexistence."

Inserting a Meaning
". . . And inserting a meaning into one's own life. Something must correspond to something, something must result from something. Perhaps, so that things just pain stupid and dishonest find an explanation."