She changed me at every stage of my life, transforming me into a better, more conscious being. She stepped in whenever the world cracked and crumbled under the weight of difficulties. A patron of the uncertain, yet receptive; queen of the wise, yet doubting. Her name? Literature.
It was back when I probably still couldn’t read on my own that I heard a story, told by my mother’s mother, about a mythical bard named Orpheus, who made great things happen with his music and poetry. When recalling this myth, my grandmother Olga placed great emphasis on Orpheus’s therapeutic power. His music, along with his skills as a bard, were capable of pacifying the angry, or bribing the guards of inaccessible realms—such as those in the underworld of Hades—as well as calming the raging oceans. His songs made trees bow, boulders crumble, and turned predatory animals into benign creatures.
I don’t know where my grandmother heard or read about this remarkable offspring of the gods. Most likely at school, as the popular Polish book on Greek and Roman myths was definitely not on our family bookshelf. Besides, she was not a diligent reader. Or maybe she just didn’t have the time, needing to take care of a bunch of kids—and later grandkids—as well as a house perpetually dirtied by grandpa’s enthusiasm for all kinds of animals. Most often she would simply steal a moment to read whatever newspaper or booklet fell into her lap. She also enjoyed overhearing stories. Whether it was while waiting in line at the grocery store, or on the bus, she’d eavesdrop whenever she had the chance. She would weave together all the stories she gathered during the day into an evening tale for her grandchildren, intertwining it with the afterimages of the school books she had read, true crime stories, mixing in recipes for housewives that she would cut out from every newspaper she put her hands on. But she also shared with us something she had inherited from her own grandmother—the treasure trove of family stories.
We usually dozed off to the melody of her voice, lulled by the tune of the “Litany of Loretto to the Blessed Virgin Mary,” which she would recite earlier. The tales she told us were opalescent with a myriad of languages and meanings all at once. They were the sesame that had opened before us, but most importantly, they were an introduction to reading and experiencing literature, something I was to realize several years later as a student of Polish philology.
Orpheus and the Signaller
Grandma personified all the goodness that comes from literature. By telling us her stories, she believed that she was immunizing us against all the poisons and diseases that adulthood had stored up for us. She would temper the not-always-so-happy childhood landscape. Like Orpheus following his beloved Eurydice, she descended with us to dark and dangerous places, represented by difficult emotions, such as anger, which grated on our innocence in a way that no adult could comprehend. Childhood tantrums and obstinacy shattered under the impact of newly concocted stories. My grandmother tamed anxieties and issues that were still unfathomable to us, like the first inconceivable deaths we had to encounter in our lives—those of hamsters and parakeets. Thanks to her, literature resembled a kind of secret knowledge that relieved tensions, but also taught us to ask unobvious questions. She encouraged us to look at other human beings as repositories, containing, just like a book, other, perhaps surprisingly more interesting stories than one would assume.
Ultimately, she taught me what a person can learn from literature—“the desire for the non-existent.” This is what the literary scholar, Ryszard Koziołek, called this feeling in his book Wiele tytułów. Eseje przygodne [Many Titles: Adventurous Essays]. “Thanks to the fact that simulation and anticipation bring us pleasure, and a sense of freedom, the practice of fiction teaches us, from childhood, to plan and contemplate the future, going beyond specific genres like utopia or science fiction. Any literary work from the past that we consider contemporary is a kind of prophecy. We call such works ‘classics,’ that is, we gather that they will be useful for times yet to come, because they have the bewildering ability to present the future to the reader, even if they were written long before the reader’s time,” Koziołek writes in the book’s opening essay.
At first, one may be baffled by the claim that fiction, i.e., something that didn’t really happen, is able to evoke the drive to foretell, or even “to plan and contemplate the future.” Koziołek suggests that it is actually possible to train ourselves in such a skill by reading Balzac or Sienkiewicz. But if we’re still in disbelief that this is possible, the essayist offers us an interesting exercise. Take a literary text, apply it to any of the contemporary concerns we face—such as the climate crisis, the increasingly more cynical politics of those in power, or the fraying mental health of children—and try to create an “emergency connection” between the two. If successful, “there will be a warning sound of recognition” in our “consciousness … that the present has been recognized by a writer from the past.”
It’s at this moment that literature takes on the role of a signaller, a whistleblower disclosing human intentions. It reveals the truth lost in the cacophony of modern media. Koziołek exemplifies the theory by making his own “emergency connection.” He parallels an excerpt from Stefan Żeromski’s novel Puszcza jodłowa [The Fir Forest] with the May 8, 2017 draft of the Environmental Security Act, and the widespread media controversy regarding the now potentially legal logging in the primeval Białowieża Forest. As a result, in 2019, when Koziołek’s book came out, Żeromski rang as relevant and current as in 1926, when his novel was published: “But who really knows if from the tribe of the humans, where everything is subject to change and uncertainty, lumberjacks with axes will yet come out again to cut down, to the root, the fir trees growing on their own homeland, on the basis of a new law, doing so in the interest of trade or profit.”
The Keys to Many Gateways
Literature flows in a good, old, and lazy current. She’s like a dense and deep river, eroding the riverbed in various directions, steadily, persistently. Our mind is the riverbed. Literature, unlike modern media, is a wonderful thing. It allows our imagination to quietly develop, having a prolonged effect, it does its job long after we have finished reading. Finally, reading allows us to create web-like micro-networks between a wide variety of issues and ideas. Allowing us to pair characters, those that are literary with ones from the real world. When a writer or poet terms something more accurately than is possible through everyday language, we get an extraordinary opportunity to catch something flickering, evanescent in a durable web.
Literary texts, unlike tweets, Facebook posts—not to mention the frenetic TikTok content—represent a certain constancy. They are tactile, physical, like a mirror hanging in a hallway, in which one can look at parts of the apartment from countless angles. To return to the same books, is to turn over and over in one’s mind the already familiar images, characters, relationships, but also to enter into a dialogue with them. Seeing Emma Bovary darning her white stocking, with which she will soon tempt Rodolphe, is to see yourself in relation to other people, to mourn one’s loneliness as a woman, experience weariness and the fear of an aging body. To observe the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, is to look at the modern world, which is building up ever more densely, embroiling characters in ever more complicated relationships, without worrying that it will soon vanish.
The fundamental power of literature is that it operates in a number of languages at once. It borrows from a variety of registers, for it has no homeland of its own. Words in novels or poems come from different territories simultaneously—in this sense, literature is quite different from the simplistic, black-and-white language of the media. Good books operate in the same language as my grandmother did—multicolored, multifaceted, unlocking many gateways at the same time.
It is impossible to understand the language of others, especially those who differ from us in ethnicity, sexuality, religion, life stories that are unlike our own, without first experiencing, through books, a variety of worlds—those nearby and those from across the ocean—written in many languages, filled with various cultural codes. It doesn’t surprise me that the first important experiences of writers, poets, humanist scholars, as well as professional readers, like me, are filled with a plurality of discourses and intricate stories. The best of the best, like Bruno Schulz or Witold Gombrowicz, had the opportunity to experience multiculturalism. When reminiscing about their family homes, they recall the intertwining of different languages and traditions. While others have only their grandmother and her multiform manner of speaking. And some have been lucky enough to experience both. Just as Gombrowicz was thanks to his grandmother Aniela Kotkowska, or Ryszard Koziołek, who recalls in his book his two grandmothers, who raised him to become a reader—Hela, a Lutheran, “a real peasant, walking barefoot from June to August,” and Milka, a Catholic, “an overweight Our-Lady-of-All-Forgiveness.”
And what, if not the epitome of the power of literature, is the grandmother figure in Hans Christian Andersen’s most popular fairy tale The Snow Queen? It is she, who through her stories, prepares Kai and Gerda for the lonesome expeditions that will soon await them, for their future confrontations with the world, as well as for their entire adult life. Gerda will become empathetic and attentive. She will set off on a trail looking for her missing brother. On the way she will talk to animals and plants, being able to understand the language of pigeons, reindeer, and flowers, which in the end will allow her to survive the dangerous journey and bring home her beloved Kai.
Seize the Flame
Edward O. Wilson, an American biologist, who is also mentioned by Koziołek in his book, quite recently formulated a bold theory that it is not the natural sciences that are the true axis of our evolution as a species, but the humanities. Concocting a flame from a piece of wood or stone was not an easy task, let alone carrying it, sustaining it, methodically building a fire. However, it would not have been possible were it not for the skills that humans, unlike other species, have developed on such an incredible scale. Wilson is, of course, talking about human communication—the Neanderthals gathering words like seeds in order to form similar-sounding sentences. Telling their primal, simple stories to each other and repeating them over and over to have them finally, thousands of years later, put into writing and read. Being human, in the deepest sense of the word, would thus mean, according to Wilson’s book The Meaning of Human Existence, that “[we] instinctively delight in the telling of countless stories about others, cast as players upon our own inner stage.” The better, deeper understanding we have of each other, the higher the ability to survive. What years of evolution did, as well as Gutenberg’s invention—enabling the rapid reproduction of the written word—was to completely change the human world. Making it possible for us, as a species, to think realistically about the future, to mature in thought and on paper. Reading and literature made it possible to literally seize that first flame, only in a different way than we’d expect.
Sándor Márai illustrates this story beautifully in his Diary 1958–1967, explaining literature’s genesis. In the winter of 1965, the Hungarian writer, shortly after a walk, noted the following: “A Thought, just like Light or Color, is a phenomenon that is stateless. It flashes and then vanishes, disintegrates. Literature had to be invented for Thought to become a perceptible phenomenon.” It seems that through these words, Márai touches upon the source, exposing that what initially was merely flickering inside the human mind, like a flame, was transformed into a fire that has now been burning for centuries—literature. It grasps this twinkling, ever-changing flame of thought, which glimmers and can be easily dimmed, and transforms it into an everlasting, living story of humanity, from its beginnings to the end of the Anthropocene. So fundamentally, literature and its stories are what save the world from vanishing, from the annihilation of its parts, even if they are quite small, like a trivial thought.
Reading the World
Is empirical reality at least somewhat comparable to the world of fantasy? And can it be structured in a similar way to literature? And reading and writing, are they most closely related to the workings of the human mind, which is, after all, constantly evolving? And can they mimic the path, the true labyrinth of man’s search for meaning in this world? Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer and poet, spent his entire mature years contemplating these questions. Fictions, his most outstanding work, was partly written during World War II. In 1942, when the world was shaking at its foundations, Borges was sitting in a hotel room reflecting on his mythical world of Tlön. He was also separated from the war’s inferno through an unusual book, because for a couple of days, he held on his lap Sir Thomas Browne’s 1658 baroque work Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial. The book of this 17th century English writer, doctor, and scientist—a man of many languages and disciplines—would be reopened several decades later by the American literary scholar Harold Bloom, who would read from it one of the most beautiful sentences in the history of literature: “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.”
At the same time, on the other side of the globe, Finnish painter Tove Jansson was sitting in her family home in Helsinki with a notebook in her lap. Like Borges, she too was fearing the war. She would soon jot down the famous sentence that begins the book The Moomins and the Great Flood: “It must have been in the afternoon around the end of August. Moomintroll and his mother came to the deepest thicket of a dense forest.”
Even earlier, a decade before the war, somewhere south of Finland, a little boy—the future great poet Zbigniew Herbert—was sitting on the lap of his beloved grandmother Maria née Bałaban, and listening to one of her many stories. Now we know that his contemporary world, including that of the city of Lviv, which was so dear to him, would soon vanish due to the ongoing war. People would perish, and with them their histories. Many valuable works would be lost. But the world would be saved through someone’s grandchildren, their stories, and the books they would soon write.
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