"How Should We Live?"
Nicholas Simpson
May 9, 2016
Szymborska’s poetry addresses many of the questions and concerns of people living in the 20th and 21st century. The unfathomability of the natural world, the frightening inevitability of death, and the nature of love are all addressed throughout her works. One of the most prevalent themes in Szymborska’s writing is addressing humanity’s long history of bloodshed, violence, and cruelty. She looks at the question of how we can live in a world whose history is so bloody and where atrocities continue to occur. Her answer to this question; how should we live, how can we live, in a world with so much suffering? Is twofold. First, humanity has to forget. Forget about almost all of the evil we have done. Luckily this happens naturally, we’re extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. Second, we have to learn to see the little things, the good in the world. We have to re-think what’s really important. Szymborska’s poetry details this balancing act of not just surviving but living in a world that often seems so dark.
Living through World War Two in Europe, Szymborska was exposed to the horror and hatred of war first hand. She is disillusioned with the shining future and inevitable progress of mankind espoused by modern thinkers such as Condorcet. In his essay, “Sketch for a Historical Picture of Progress of the Human Mind” Condorcet frames humanity’s history and future as being a result of an inevitable advancement of human morality and natural science. He believed that the evils of humanity were a result of a bad society and not a basic fact of human nature. Szymborska disagrees with Condorcet and his type of Modern thought on multiple fronts. She knows that while the advance of science has brought a lot of good to humanity it can do a lot of harm as well. In her poem “Discovery” she writes about a scientist who discovers something, a better way to blow people up, a super virus, or maybe a method of mind control, that terrifies him so much that he destroys his entire career to hide it from the world. With scientific advancement comes power, and humanity has shown time and time again that it will use that power not just for good but for death and for war. Szymborska also seems to disagree with the belief that humanity is not inherently flawed or that we have improved substantially during our history. In “Tortures” she says “Nothing has changed / the body still trembles as it trembled / before Rome was founded and after” (8-10). Szymborska states that while the reasons and methods may be different the facts of mankind’s inhumanity, that we torture each other, has yet to change. In “Century’s Decline” Szymborska seems to address Condorcet directly, “Our twentieth century was supposed to improve on the others. / It will never prove it now” and then, “anyone who planned to enjoy the world / is now faced / with a hopeless task.” Szymborska laments the gap between the high expectations people had for the future and what the future eventually became. It’s not that the world is significantly worse now, it stayed basically the same, people stayed the same. They declared war, they tortured, and they killed innocents in pursuit of power.
One poem that does an excellent job at expressing Szymborska’s negative view of human history is “Hatred”. “Hatred” personifies hatred as a predatory parasite of humanity. Szymborska presents hatred as the strongest and most influential emotion affecting history. “Need we mention… All the pages it has added to our history books? / All the human carpets it has spread / over countless city squares and football fields?” (30-33) She references her own experience of living through the Second World War when she writes, “whatever gets it ready, in position. / One fatherland or another” (13-14) She identifies the real motive behind the Nazi’s violence as not being some patriotic quest for the Vaterland but as a hatred for their fellow man.
Szymborska has a view of the world that seems to be very similar to Kepler’s in the eponymous novel, Kepler. Johannes Kepler also lived in a time that was often violent and unpredictable. In the novel he is persecuted for his religion, he loses children to sickness, and he is surrounded almost constantly by one war or another. Throughout the book, Kepler expresses a feeling of dissatisfaction with the way the world is. When riding away from Tycho Brahe’s castle near the beginning of the novel he experiences one of these moments of profound disappointment, “Kepler sighed. His world was patched together from the wreckage of an infinitely finer, immemorial dwelling place; the pieces were precious and lovely, enough to break his heart, but they did not fit.” (Banville 62). Kepler and Szymborska both seem to feel that the world is not what it should be, what it could be if things were different. They are experiencing the feeling of The Absurd as defined by Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus”. He says, “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. (Camus 15) For Szymborska, The Absurd is the gap between what the optimistic of history predicted for humanity and the truth of our continued failure to improve. This hope, and its irony, are expressed in the last two lines of her poem, “The Letters of the Dead”. “The most fervent of them [the dead] gaze confidingly into our eyes: / their calculations tell them that they will find perfection there.”(19-20) Szymborska recognizes the expectations of past generations looking to the future as a place of moral progress. The Absurd is the difference between the predictions of the dead and the reality of the living. It should be noted that Szymborska is not an absurdist, or at least a very bad one. While she is clearly dissatisfied with the state of living and humanity as she has found it she still retains hope that there is meaning in the world and that there is good worth living for. “I prefer to keep in mind even the possibility / that existence has its own reason for being”
After looking at many of the ways in which Szymborska expresses her unhappiness with humanity and history it is necessary to also do the opposite, to look at her hopefulness. Szymborska is known for her contradictions. Just as the average person sometimes feels as though the world is a place of darkness and misery and sometimes feels happy and content so too does Szymborska express feelings both of disgust with the evils of humanity and of hopeful happiness for the good that does exist in the world. In the poem “True Love” Szymborska expresses a joyful disbelief at the nonsensical happiness experienced by people in love. She frames true love as something which doesn’t really seem to belong in this world, it’s impractical, random, and unnecessary. But, in the end, love is one of things that really makes the world worth living in. The poem ends by saying, “Let the people who never find true love / keep saying that there’s no such thing. / Their faith will make it easier to live and die.” (32-34) People who never find true love and don’t believe in it necessarily live in a darker and colder world than those who do. This makes it easier for them to die as they have less of an attachment to the world. When asking the question of why one should continue living in a world that can often seem so hateful, love is a pretty good reason.
Szymborska has the idea that one of the reasons history often seems so dark is that people tend to record things like wars and massacres and to leave out smaller, happier events. In “No Title Required” Szymborska starts the poem with one of these lesser events.
It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree
Beside a river
On a sunny morning
It’s an insignificant event
And won’t go down in history.
It’s not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides. (1-8)
She suggests that while maybe only wars, battles, and violence get recorded and passed down to the future, human history is full of mundane and happy happenings that, while unimportant to the future of nations, are what living is mostly composed of. The poem ends with the observation that for most people the bulk of life is not endless suffering and violence but commonplace and everyday events. “When I see such things, I’m no longer sure that what’s important / is more important than what’s not.” (44-46) Her word play shows the conflicting ways of thinking about what is important. Is it the big things? Hatred and subjugation and the movement of armies? Or is it the little things? Sitting under a tree next to the Raba in the sun or watching a snail crawl up the window glass? Szymborska’s answer is both. The blood of history and the suffering of our fellow man cannot be ignored, surely. But there is more to life and more to history than what is written in text books. As she says to the Yeti,
Yeti, crime is not all
we’re up to down there.
Yeti, not every sentence there
means death. (18)
Szymborska proposes a second step necessary to living in the world as it is. If people lived in the Valley of Obviously and knew the full extent of mankind’s long and violent history they would be crushed under the weight of that knowledge, they would drown in that river of blood. The second step then is ignorance, the ability to forget about what happened here. Szymborska expresses this imperative in her poem “Reality Demands”. “Reality Demands” gives its thesis in the first three lines, “Reality demands / that we also mention this: / Life goes on.” (1-3) The poem enumerates the places where life continues to be lived, the people able to operate despite the battles, the scores of dead that were there before them. Szymborska says, “This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, / of mornings / that make waking up worthwhile.” (31-33) This both asks and answers one of Szymborska’s core questions. Why would someone want to wake up, to be alive, in a world so deeply steeped in violence and blood? Because reality demands it. The flow of time pushes us forward, it dries the blood and lets us forget which fields are battlefields. Szymborska says in "The End and The Beginning”
Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at the clouds (43-47)
More than an ability Szymborska seems to see it as almost a job, to forget the past. “After every war / someone has to tidy up” (1-2) moving on and forgetting the horrible things that were done at a certain place is the duty of mankind, one of the only ways that we can make up for the atrocities committed there. The last four lines of “Reality Demands” describes both the strangeness and benefits of being able to forget.
On tragic mountain passes
the wind rips hats from unwitting heads
and we can’t help
laughing at that. (49-52)
“unwitting heads” refers simultaneously to the person’s obliviousness to a sudden gust of wind and their ignorance of the events that made their setting a, “tragic mountain pass”. Similarly, the last two lines, “and we can’t help / laughing at that.” Refers both to the someone’s ability to laugh at something little and silly in a place that has seen so much serious violence, a laughter granted by humanity’s ability to forget and move on, and to Szymborska’s laughter, our joy, at the fact that a humanity cursed with hatred is also blessed with the ability to forget the unacceptable events that hatred has wrought. Expressed most succinctly in “Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”
We’ve inherited hope-
the gift of forgetting.
You’ll see how we give
birth among the ruins. (18-21)
My home, when I’m not at school, is about a twenty minute train ride from the Smithsonian in DC. When I was younger, maybe 15 or 16, my family took a day trip to see the museums. I have been to the Smithsonian before and since multiple times but this was the first time I ever went to the Holocaust museum. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is absolutely heartbreaking. The attempt to humanize a travesty that is often conveyed only as numbers of the dead in text books is successful, and this humanization leads to a visceral, emotional response and despair that humanity can be so calloused and so cruel. Also at the Smithsonian is the Air and Space museum, documenting humanity’s quest to discover and explore more of the universe. There are the botanical gardens, full of beautiful plants from around the world. And, missing from the Smithsonian, is the vast majority of human history. Some of it is horrible, some of it is wonderful, most of it is people just living as best they can.
Humanity can be awful. The universe is always confusing and often painful. Szymborska knows this, her poems struggle with the pain of existing as one of the end results of a violent history. Despite this her poetry is typically lighthearted and playful, twisting language just enough to make you laugh as well as think. She doesn’t have all the answers to how someone should live in this world. But she has some pretty good suggestions: Let the world move on and forget. And when you can’t forget, when you want to abandon horrible humanity and go live as a hermit in the mountains, try to remember that it’s not all bad down here.
Yeti we’ve got Shakespeare there.
Yeti, we play solitaire
and violin. At nightfall,
we turn the lights on, Yeti. (22-25)
Works Cited
Banville, John. Kepler. London: Secker & Warburg, 1981. PDF.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1955. Print.
Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas De Caritat. Condorcet: Selected Writings. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976. PDF.
Szymborska, Wistawa. Poems New and Collected. Trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. New York: Harcourt, 1998. Print.