Art & Creativity Quote by Wislawa Szymborska

Newness is a comforting fiction, and Szymborska punctures it with a poet's scalpel. "Every beginning is only a sequel" refuses the clean slate fantasy baked into graduations, reinventions, even revolutions. The line does more than sound wise; it shifts the moral burden of time. If beginnings are sequels, then nothing arrives innocent. Every fresh start drags its prehistory behind it: habits, debts, traumas, compromises, inherited language. You're not stepping onto an empty stage; you're walking into a scene already in progress.

The second image sharpens the idea into something almost physical: "the book of events is always open halfway through". It's a quiet rebuke to the human craving for a proper prologue. We want origin stories because they make the present feel legible, and legibility feels like control. Szymborska denies the reader that control. The world isn't arranged for comprehension; we enter mid-paragraph, mid-argument, mid-life, and the plot will keep running after we exit. That "always" is the punch: not sometimes, not for some people, but structurally.

Context matters here. Szymborska wrote out of a 20th-century Europe addicted to "new eras" that arrived with slogans and left with rubble. In Poland especially, the rhetoric of historical resets was a political weapon. Her skepticism is elegant rather than loud: she doesn't preach, she reframes. The wit is in the understatement. Halfway through is both banal and devastating, a reminder that the most honest starting point is admission: you are late, and the story doesn't pause for you.