Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, less known to most Americans than many of headline grabbing Eastern European anti-Stalinist artists, defected in the early 1950s, citing later that it was not the strongest minds but rather those with the weakest stomachs who became dissidents. While the mind can rationalize anything, the “stomach can only take so much.” When I photographed him in Berkeley, I found a gentle but forceful man of great countenance with piercing blue eyes. I was quietly in awe.