Many people who celebrate Christmas have a decorated Christmas tree (if they are lucky: tree shortages are reported.) The custom actually predates Christianity by centuries. Ancient Romans decorated trees with small pieces of metal during Saturnalia, their winter festival in honor of Saturnus, the god of agriculture. Modern Christmas trees appeared in the middle 1500’s.

It is customary to put a star on top which symbolizes the Star of Bethlehem, purported to have guided adoring folks to the manger where the Messiah was born. Angels can be found up there (the manger and the tree) as well, the latter ever after Queen Victoria introduced them in her Windsor Castle decorations. Unlikely that they look like the angels from today’s photographs, though. (Here is a lovely history of the Christmas tree customs.)

My thoughts today, however, were prompted by a different star, one used with customary slight of pen by one of my favorite poets to point to the vastness of the universe where even the sun is small, and to our corresponding speck-ness. Yes, I know, not a word, but an image that, you will hopefully agree, captures our limitations.

Under a Certain Little Star

Wislawa Szymborska

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity in case I’m mistaken.
May happiness not be angry if I take it for my own.
May the dead forgive me that their memory’s but a flicker.
My apologies to time for the multiplicity of the world overlooked
  each second.
My apologies to an old love for treating the new one as the first.
Forgive me far-off wars for taking my flowers home.
Forgive me open wounds for pricking my finger.
My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the 
  abyss.
My apologies to those in railway stations for sleeping comfortably 
  at five in the morning.
Pardon me hounded hope for laughing sometimes.
Pardon me deserts for not rushing in with a spoonful of water.
And you O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage,
forever still and staring at the same spot,
absolve me even if you happened to be stuffed.
My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs.
My apologies to large questions for small answers.
Truth, do not pay me too much attention.
Solemnity, be magnanimous to me.
Endure, O mystery of being that I might pull threads from your
  veil.

Soul, don’t blame me that I’ve got you so seldom.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere.
My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and
  woman.
I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me,
because I myself am my own obstacle.
Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words,
and then labor to make them light.

Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

(For language lovers, here is a serious treat – 4 different translations of this poem side by side.)

The poem holds for me a complicated emotional tension, one that has been particularly true in this year, a year that held personal tragedy for our family and shared tragedy for mankind, from the persistence of hatred between those not like each other, the victory laps of greed and power, the premature death of so many to, finally, the unmitigated slide towards climate disaster.

The poem’s endless run of apologies had its echoes in my own head – the sense of unearned privilege against the suffering of the many, the sense of inadequacy in fulfilling public moral obligations or my own demands of a private ethical self. Thinking of yourself as inconsiderate, forgetful, unjustly privileged, over-consuming or all around your own obstacle is, on the one hand, a good thing. Insight could lead to change.

On the other hand, it is also a preoccupation with self, with our own role and importance, with individual choice that might or might not make a difference. I do not read the poem as solely a call to go gently on yourself, allow yourself pleasure, acknowledge that you can’t fix everything, an encouragement to just lead your life, because no-one is perfect. I do not believe that self, alone, is to be the ultimate obstacle, the challenge to what is happening under a certain little star.

The title of the poem that puts the individual under a planetary body really points to the fact, in my reading, that it is not just about me, that infinitesimal small speck in the universe. It is about us, all of us, that live and love, act and die under this sun. It is as a collective, on a shared planet, that we have to change ways, or can change ways, with the individual improvement being a necessary but not sufficient step. The focus on untamed individualism, for good or bad, blinds us to the dire need for concerted action as community. We need to plan, agree upon, and carry out changes with shared intent, because the cause is bigger than just individual remedies of personal imperfections.

I, too, across the years, have labored to make words light in this blog, but these I mean in all their weight.

I will take a little break and resume writing in January. Happy Holidays!