The ruined career

I believe in the great discovery.
I believe in the man who made the discovery.
I believe in the fear of the man
who made the discovery . . .

This is the beginning of the poem “Discovery” by the Nobel laureate, Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (pronounced ShimBORska). It was first published in a 1972 collection. Poland was under Communist rule at that time, but poetry still flourished. This poem has spoken to me ever since I first read it, and I have shared it with others without exactly knowing why. Most likely it was the strong statements of belief that mark the poem from beginning to end. Or it might have been a little bird – I don’t know (as Szymborska was also fond of saying). You can easily read this poem by googling “Discovery” by Szymborska.

Not even the bird

Speaking of discoveries, Polish poetry was one for me when I first visited Poland for a two-week summer program. The Poles I met in 1996 were really poor by Dutch standards, but they loved their culture and language and enthusiastically shared them. We were introduced to Czeslaw Milosz, another celebrated poet (I recommend “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” by Milosz). The experience encouraged me so much that I returned to Poland three years later to learn the language. It was good being a European in the 1990s – but I digress.

The poem “Discovery” appears at first to proclaim a strong faith in science and progress, but that is not the story it tells. Instead, the scientist in the poem is completely shocked by what he has found, so much so that he decides to destroy his discovery and anything that might lead to its recreation: notes, calculations, tablets and all. Not even his wife, the spying government or the bird in the sky that freely sings will ever know of it. Thus, the final lines of the poem run:

I believe in the refusal to take
part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the wasted years of
work.
I believe in the secret taken to
the grave.

These words soar for me
beyond all rules
without seeking support from
actual examples.
My faith is strong, blind, and
without foundation.

The steep cost

We never learn what the discovery was. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the poet’s naive faith in science and progress has been replaced by a deeper faith, one that does not allow for, or need, scientific verification. It is a faith that says that when humans are confronted with the awful reality of what they have created, they will choose to withdraw from it and pay the steep cost to their pride and their careers. They will refuse to take part.

This faith takes some strong believing in, now that we are in an age where one can easily feel surrounded by reckless ambition, privacy-destroying technology, indifference to suffering and consumerism as pervasive as a Communist regime. In this season of epiphany – the discovery of Jesus – it would be a good thing if Christians would also let the faith of this poet speak to them, as a little bird.