This past weekend I turned 34 and celebrated Thursday, Friday and Saturday with Gen Y A.(we're sort of together again). Sunday was a day of recovery and sloth, culminating in a viewing of Under the Tuscan Sun which stars Diane Lane. The movie was surprisingly good given the plot and premise, mostly because of the intelligent, charming Lane. Her character hires some Polish laborers to fix up a Tuscan house she purchased and one of them gives her a book by Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz who coincidently died on Saturday.

When Communism was smashed in Poland, Mr. Milosz returned to what he called "the country of my first immigration." Arriving in Warsaw after an absence of three decades, he received a hero's welcome. Mr. Milosz was regarded as one of the world's literary immortals. When he chose, he walked and talked with the great men of his time, but he remained humble.

I once had the pleasure of seeing him read in college. He had some great lines, like in his poem No Way Out where he says Irony is the "glory of slaves."