A Word on Statistics
Out of every hundred people
those who always know better:
fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.
Ready to help,
if it doesn't take long:
forty-nine.
Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four—well, maybe five.
Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.
Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.
Those not to be messed with:
forty and four.
Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.
Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.
Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.
Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it's better not to know,
not even approximately.
Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.
Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).
Doubled over in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.
Those who are just:
quite a few at thirty-five.
But if it takes effort to understand:
three.
Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.
Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred—
a figure that has never varied yet.
Notes
Sylvia Plath's I Am Vertical explores the discomfort of being a conscious, separate self in a world where everything else seems to belong naturally. Wisława Szymborska's A Word on Statistics approaches that same human condition from a different direction, sorting people into categories according to their habits, fears, virtues, and contradictions. The poem reads almost like an ordinary statistical report, until its classifications begin to reveal how little such measurements can tell us about a person. There is something unsettling about our desire to make human existence measurable. Numbers promise objectivity, but they also create the illusion that understanding a population is the same as understanding the people within it. Szymborska's irony lies in the contradictions that statistics cannot resolve: we can be compassionate and cruel, certain and doubtful, courageous in one moment and cowardly in another. And while the categories keep changing, the final certainty remains universal. October's decay reaches beyond the body into the systems of knowledge through which we try to make sense of ourselves. Our personalities shift, convictions weaken, and the identities we defend so carefully become less stable with time. Yet beneath all these differences lies one statistic that needs no calculation: every one of us is mortal. #WislawaSzymborska #statistics #mortality #Poetry #existentialism