Today gladly disappears again

“You exist, so you will disappear

You disappear, so you are beautiful.”

― “Nothing Twice” by Wislawa Szymborska

The above is quoted from “The End and the Beginning,” the collection of poems by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. The poem, which is in the Polish textbook and loved by all Polish people, has an easy and repetitive poetic language that hits the mark. A life in which a person who felt like a rose yesterday feels like a rock today. The poet talks about the transience of life without a repeating day or the next opportunity. Why did Szymborska say we are beautiful when we are bound by tomorrow where everything will disappear and the inevitable death?

Books may seem hard and solid at a glance, but they have a strange nature that transcends between materials and non-materials, as well as existence and non-existence. Thoughts and stories of writers become tangible books. Books become new thoughts in readers’ minds and disappear like a cup of water splashed in the desert. There is no repetition. The book I read is different from the one you read, and the one I read a few years ago is different from the one I read today.

In the process of creating books, editors repeatedly exist, disappear, and then reappear. Editors are the ones who read the text the most often but are not readers and who try their best to pay attention to each punctuation mark but are not writers. Caring and cheering for books as a person who is neither directly involved in them nor completely separated from them is quite compulsive and confusing.

As beings that are strange and unknown always are, books and the work of creating them are mysterious and beautiful. We who are left in the place where variating but not repeating sentences pass like waves are not the same as yesterday. We dare to start again as we disappear and change. Like the poem that ends by suggesting putting arms around each other’s shoulders and seeking accordance even if we are different like “just as two drops of water are,” today is gladly disappearing again. Books allow us to imagine beautiful drops of water that will be born anew in readers’ minds. Szymborska might have been talking about such an idea.