I want to hug Szymborska
- Joanna Makowska
- Jan 25
- 5 min read
I’ve always wanted to meet a writer, an artist. Not for an autograph, not for a photo. My dream was a conversation: why they write, what art is for. Why write at all, when life can be so shamelessly incomprehensible.
During a conversation with my one and only “poet,” I realized that what I really want is to hug Szymborska. It was hard to decide whether I needed her more, or she needed me. But it’s probably me who needs her.
If Wittgenstein is right, then there will always be a crack between you and me that no sentence can plaster over. And from that comes a cold conclusion: if I can’t fully say myself, then no one will ever grasp or understand me one hundred percent. No one will ever step into my shoes, even if they wear the same size.
Nietzsche adds something even more bitter: even when we use the same words, it doesn’t mean we mean the same thing. “Sadness,” “pain,” “emptiness” - three labels, and under each one a different story, a different body, a different memory. Understanding isn’t a matter of vocabulary. It’s a matter of shared experience, a shared nerve of the world. Without that, conversation can feel like exchanging coins from different countries: a similar shape, but a different value.
And Nagel goes straight to the heart with the question of what it feels like to the taste of an experience. There are facts about the world you can verify, and then there are facts about being someone that can’t be fully delivered from the outside. You can describe another person’s fear, but you won’t feel it in exactly the same way. You can understand someone’s “why,” but you won’t live their “how.” Something remains untranslatable like a private dialect of pain.
And yet into this silent, uncrossable space between our private worlds, the poet arrives. Not with a plaster for the crack, nor with a translator for our private dialects, but with a different offering entirely. A poet like Szymborska does not argue against Wittgenstein or Nietzsche; she accepts their stark terrain. She starts from the very premise that we are, each of us, alone on this planet, islands of subjective experience. And then, from the shore of her own island, she does the thing we all believe is impossible: she sends out a message in a bottle that somehow, against all odds, contains a map of our coastline. She writes about the world as if she were holding you by the sleeve when the ground is slippery. Her genius is not in denying our fundamental solitude, but in composing such a precise, tender, and ironic record of its landscape that within it, you recognize your own. She builds a bridge not of shared meaning, but of shared recognition, a whisper that says I see this, too. And for a moment, the impossible happens: the bridge holds.
That’s when Szymborska’s images come back to me: “People on a Bridge”, where everything flows past, passes by, doesn’t stay as if a person could be forgotten as easily as a day. And “A Great Number”, where the human being is one unit among many, easy to miss, replaceable; abandonment without drama, without romantic noise just quiet and everyday.
And that is exactly where Szymborska hurts the most: she doesn’t try to “solve” absence, she shows what it does to a room. In “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” grief becomes something domestic and maddeningly practical, the lamp that no longer turns on at the right hour, the footsteps on the stairs that are not the right ones, the hand that puts food down being a different hand. “To die, you don’t do that to a cat”: the line sounds almost simple, but it carries the whole disorder of love after disappearance. The world looks the same, and yet it has been rearranged; nothing has moved, and yet everything is out of place.
Szymborska could hide gravity inside a joke and pain inside precision. Her irony wasn’t a mask for show. It was a method of survival: not to melt into pathos, not to give the world the satisfaction of breaking her. There is something in her writing that hurts me in a particular way: the image of places where everything is explained. An island of certainty, where ready-made answers grow and no one has to ask questions. When I read her “Utopia”, I feel that I want that bush heavy with answers too. I want to stop asking. I want to stop searching. Because I once created my own small utopia in an English assignment: the Utopia of the ignorants. A world where not knowing isn’t shameful but shelter. But that utopia was taken from me. As if someone had taken not the pages, but the will to write.
That’s why I go looking for Szymborska as if it were possible, as if you could find a person after they’re gone. Maybe I’m not looking for a grave, but for proof that what I feel has somewhere to stand. In one of her poems about returns, there is a scene where an adult suddenly curls up like a child, as if for a moment they have slipped back into the womb, into defensive darkness. It hits me with brutal simplicity: even the best have bad days. Even the wisest sometimes just lie there, silent.
And when I truly have no strength left, I return to Possibilities, her private list of “I prefer.” I love that the poem isn’t a manifest. It’s breathing. Choosing small things that keep a person attached to the world, even when the world isn’t holding the person. When I read the poem, every repeated “I prefer” feels like a mantra: this is who I am, and this is who I want to be. Out of many possibilities, the speaker chooses one, maybe small or seemingly trivial, but important precisely because it matters to her. Szymborska also suggests that identity isn’t fixed in advance. We shape it ourselves. It shows that each of us is different, and that we actively choose who we become. And even though it’s completely okay to wonder about the meaning of life, the speaker chooses another stance: she prefers to believe that existence itself has its own reason - that being, in its ordinary, imperfect form, is still worth holding onto.
“Yes - in everyday speech we say “the ordinary world,"ordinary life,"the ordinary order of things,” because it’s faster, lighter. But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is ordinary anymore. No stone and no cloud above it. No day and no night after it. And above all, no one’s existence in this world.”
Wisława Szymborska, from the Nobel Lecture “The Poet and the World” (Poeta i świat), Swedish Academy, Stockholm, 7 December 1996.
Poetry doesn’t promise complete understanding, it only refuses to flatten. It insists that what we call “ordinary” is, inside, ungraspable. And maybe that’s why, even if no one will ever understand us all the way through, a poem can sometimes do one priceless thing: not explain, but stay. Hold on to your sleeve when it gets slippery.
Because if art is for anything, maybe it’s for this: that in the worst moment, someone unknown can say to us, in a sentence so simple it’s almost funny - you’re not the only one who feels this.
And that is why I want to hug Szymborska.
Page design Asya Chub
Bibliography
Wisława Szymborska, from the Nobel Lecture “The Poet and the World” (Poeta i świat), Swedish Academy, Stockholm, 7 December 1996.
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