"It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself"
About this Quote
The line lands with Szymborska's signature sleight of hand: a plainspoken sentence that quietly indicts our hunger to sound certain. On its face, it's modest - of course you can't clarify what you haven't grasped. But the sting is in how often we try anyway, packaging fog as guidance, mistaking fluency for knowledge. Szymborska doesn't scold; she shrugs. That shrug is the weapon.
As a poet formed by mid-century Poland - a world saturated with official explanations, compulsory narratives, and the moral pressure to "have a position" - she understood how ideology trains people to talk past their own confusion. The quote reads like a small act of resistance against that coercion. If you can't articulate it because you don't understand it, maybe the honest move is to stop performing comprehension.
The subtext is psychological, too: we outsource our thinking by teaching, advising, posting, opining. Explaining becomes a way to stabilize the self, to pin down an identity ("I'm the kind of person who knows"). Szymborska punctures that vanity with a gentle tautology. It's almost comic in its inevitability, which is why it works. The sentence closes like a trap: if you protest, you confirm it.
There's also compassion here. It grants permission not to translate every private tangle into a public lesson. In an age where everyone is expected to be their own commentator, Szymborska suggests a braver posture: admit the limits of your understanding before you recruit someone else into them.
As a poet formed by mid-century Poland - a world saturated with official explanations, compulsory narratives, and the moral pressure to "have a position" - she understood how ideology trains people to talk past their own confusion. The quote reads like a small act of resistance against that coercion. If you can't articulate it because you don't understand it, maybe the honest move is to stop performing comprehension.
The subtext is psychological, too: we outsource our thinking by teaching, advising, posting, opining. Explaining becomes a way to stabilize the self, to pin down an identity ("I'm the kind of person who knows"). Szymborska punctures that vanity with a gentle tautology. It's almost comic in its inevitability, which is why it works. The sentence closes like a trap: if you protest, you confirm it.
There's also compassion here. It grants permission not to translate every private tangle into a public lesson. In an age where everyone is expected to be their own commentator, Szymborska suggests a braver posture: admit the limits of your understanding before you recruit someone else into them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
|---|
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