A few weeks ago, I achieved at last a long-imagined pilgrimage to the home of the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, in Kraków. I have written often about Szymborska, who spent most of her life in Kraków and died there, at the age of eighty-eight, in 2012. Her poetry first fell on me, as it did on so many others, like an anvil made of feathers—striking but soft—after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1996. There was no literary shrine I wanted to go to more, to doff my spiritual hat and drink in the surroundings of the poet, who is beloved by readers for her unique mix of humor, more even than wit, beautifully amalgamated with sudden turns of pensive reflection. What’s more, I got to go there in the company of her former amanuensis, Michał Rusinek, and Michał Choiński, a poet

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