…Unprepared, yes — I can't — I lack the necessary sense of proportion with the landscape, the moment, things, and events — not cowardice — unready at the threshold of action, entirely alien to the destination that others have promised me.

How is it possible for others to gradually define our fate, to impose it upon us, and for us to accept it? How do a few threads of our own moments weave the entire fabric of our year, rough and dark, thrown like a cover from our head to our feet, hiding our entire face and hands, where they placed an unknown knife — completely unknown — and illuminate with its harsh glow a landscape that is not ours — this I know: not ours.

And how is it possible for our own fate to accept this, to withdraw and look at us and our foreign fate as strangers — mute, stern, resigned, indifferent, not even with the air of magnanimity or stoicism, without at least vanishing, without dying, leaving us at the mercy of a foreign fate, but only one — not dual and divided.

There it is, staying there, as if drowsy — one eye closed and the other wide open, letting us see her observing us and noticing our eternal oscillation, without approval or disapproval.

Budapest, Athens, Samos, Mycenae, June 1962 - July 1966

Excerpt from the poem "Orestes", Kedros, 1981