Distraction by Wisława Szymborska

Wisława Szymborska’s Distraction seems to pop up in my thoughts more often than most poems, and always because of one particular image: “a nail stuck only halfway in the wall.”

This image of detached experience instinctively seems so wrong, and yet that is our experience most of the time. For the majority of our lives, we do indeed “live around the clock without questions, without surprise” – completely out of touch with the constant reaction of awe that life merits.

After all, how could we possibly live each moment with the intensity that its uniqueness deserves? This feels all-the-more impossible these days, with the enhanced mundaneness of daily life during a pandemic. The constant routine and minimal change of scenery naturally invite a passive existence, going through all of the motions without second thought.

And yet Szymborska’s stance is made clear from her first line – that to live without “amazed participation” amounts to misbehaving, as if it were sincerely impolite to the cosmos to do so. Her poem is a call to conscious, mindful living – but also a reminder that the extraordinariness of every moment doesn't depend on our noticing it.

The “cosmic savoir vivre”, however, demands that we do.

---------

Distraction by Wisława Szymborska

I misbehaved in the cosmos yesterday.

I lived around the clock without questions, without surprise.

I performed daily tasks

as if only that were required.

Inhale, exhale, right foot, left, obligations,

not a thought beyond getting there and getting back.

The world might have been taken for bedlam,

but I took it just for daily use.

No whats -- no what fors --

and why on earth it is -- and how come it needs so many moving parts.

I was like a nail stuck only halfway in the wall

or (comparison I couldn’t find).

One change happened after another

even in a twinkling’s narrow span.

Yesterday’s bread was sliced otherwise

by a hand a day younger at a younger table.

Clouds like never before and rain like never,

since it fell after all in different drops.

The world rotated on its axis,

but in a space abandoned forever.

This took a good 24 hours.

1,440 minutes of opportunity. 86,400 seconds for inspection.

The cosmic savoir vivre

may keep silent on our subject, still it makes a few demands:

occasional attention, one or two of Pascal’s thoughts, and amazed participation in a game with rules unknown.

---------