Literature is thaumaturgic, it conjures miracles out of a distillation of the ordinary and the extraordinary that teems in the wholly human realm of language. Elias Canetti believed that Literature can heal.
I experienced that. Swann's seemingly unending agony in pursuit of Odette ushered me to the end of a harrowing year of unrequited love, and suddenly kicked me out of that gulch of gloom with this surprising denouement:
Dire que j'ai gâché des années de ma vie, que j'ai voulu mourir, que j'ai eu mon plus grand amour, pour une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui n'était pas mon genre!Szymborska does it over and over.
Her lines, her astonishing endings, reach deep down our layers of humanity and cast a ray of Caravaggio's light unto the darkness. And that ray is as mighty as God striking Saul on the road to Damascus and yet as gentle as a mother stroking her baby.
Thus, the "life goes on" of Reality Demands placed my experience of September 11th within the sweeping cycles of history, portraying the forlorn quest for meanings foreshortened against the the wheel of impermanence. And yesterday she struck again, with the final awe of Nothing is a gift. At the end of the day, all we are left with is the soul. Perhaps, her soul is the grains of sand that make her wisdom and truth and beauty, that support our steps like singing sands, that make you realize in the beginning there is the Word, and the World, our World, whirls out of that Word.
Thank you, Wislawa!
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