Tag: poetry

The poem, which you can read at the Poetry Foundation, starts with:

Out of every hundred people

those who always know better:

fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:

almost all the rest.

– from “A Word on Statistics” by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak

I’ve been revisiting Szymborksa’s poem over the past year, and I like it for multiple reasons:

• Her poem offers a strange comfort. Partly, it’s the dark comfort of thinking, “We’re all doomed together.” But it’s also the comfort of connection with other people.

• It’s a poem that helps make me more patient.

• Even though statistics are impersonal, and this poem isn’t about any one person in particular, it still feels deeply human and personal.

• The poem inspires compassion. Statistics often desensitize (remember this quote attributed without evidence to Stalin?), but this poem does the opposite. It makes you keenly sensitive to people: what they face, what they do, how they fail themselves and others, how they inspire.

• There’s sorrow in the poem, because we’re a sorry lot. The poem helps make the sorrow more bearable.

• It captures some of the limitations of statistics, including the imprecision. There’s a lot that’s unquantifiable about us.