Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska, Polish poet and Nobel Laureate, died this month. I have been a big fan of her poetry since I came across her in Czeslaw Milosz's anthology, A Book of Luminous Things (yes, that is the best title imaginable for a poetry anthology, and yes, the book absolutely lives up to its name.) Szymborska was a writer who found me at an important time in my life, during a year spent studying at the University of Tennessee where I found a life shaped by reading and writing poetry in a community of brilliant, important, and hugely talented friends and writers. I found, and still find, her poetry inspiring. I love how her poems are deceptively simple- they are so lyrical, so intricate, such a pleasure to unravel. There is one poem of hers - the first I ever read- that I often find myself returning to. I consider it a beautiful meditation on language and experience.

View With a Grain of Sand

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
Whether general, particular,
Permanent, passing,
Incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that's just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

Milosz considers Szymborska's view too scientific, too detached, but my own response feels more complicated than this. Like Milosz I dislike the idea of being so disconnected from the world around me, but in this poem I feel that Szymborska celebrates the richness of the internal experience in a way that is honest. It means that every individual's experience of the world is wholly unique. It also feels peaceful , as if to say worries and limitations are what we impose on ourselves- the world goes right on without them. Also, it sounds just beautiful. If you can get away with it read it aloud and you'll see what I mean.

Perhaps my reading of the poem is also coloured by Szymborska's Nobel lecture which is charming, funny, and which celebrates how astonishing the world really is, how far away she feels from finding answers. It is this desire for answers that drove her poetry, and that drives me every day in my own small endeavours. It is her own particular definition of inspiration that I find so moving because it is real, and it is why I am unimaginably lucky.

"Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

There aren't many such people. Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.

And so, though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings."