Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of July 2nd
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It is the 183rd day of the year, leaving 182 days remaining in 2022.
She told her stories in verse, using plain if subtle language with her trademark wit. She wrote her poems in various voices -- a cat wandering in an empty apartment, a spouse after the untimely death of a partner.
Szymborska reflected on themes such as war and peace, love and loss, death and war, and the moral and ethical issues of the day.
In her poem, Consolation, she wrote about why she believed the tale that Charles Darwin only read novels with a happy ending. If the novel turned out otherwise, she wrote, "... enraged, he threw the book in the fire."
Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he'd had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He'd earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.
Her literary output was small -- some 400 or so poems over her life. Later, she rejected some of her early volumes of poetry, because they were written in the Socialist Realism school in an attempt to conform to the censorship of the Stalinist regime.
Still, she was popular in her country, which somewhat surprised her because she wrote of her belief that few people actually enjoy poetry.
When she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, the board said she wrote her poetry "with ironic precision (that) allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."
Szymborska died in 2012 in Kraków, Poland, where she lived most of her life.
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