To Believe…

In publishing each new work for Sophia’s Notebook, a corresponding poem (or poems) is selected from Sophia’s own body of work as an accompaniment. Why? Because, as the award in her name highlights, Sophia—that born historian—believed that culture (in particular, art and literature) represents an ongoing conversation across time. As T. S. Eliot stated in his seminal essay on literary tradition, the significance of any poet must be interpreted in terms of the “appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” So too, for Sophia, art and literature were an interactive process—one that for historian Sophia stretched backwards across millennia, but one which also, for sci fi writing Sophia, looked forwards to writers and artists yet unborn.

The poem of Sophia’s featured here—in dialogue not just with Paul’s Hymn but with the great current of human experience—is from her first collection, Antiquity (written at the ages of 13 and 14, Antiquity reflects both Sophia’s passion for history and her unfolding sense of the dilemma of human existence within it). In its spiritual composure, The Shrine to the Unknown Gods embodies to us the full meaning of its young writer’s name: Sophia,which is to say, Wisdom.

At the heart of Sophia’s poem rests a profound truth: there is a point at which we humans reach the limits of our capacity to know or even to express the limited perception we do have of the farthest reaches of being.

“Philosophy begins in wonder,” Socrates states in Plato’s Theaetetus. A genuine quest for truth therefore sets out from a position of “epistemic humility” or an awareness that one does not have complete understanding of some particular circumstance; but wisdom—the ultimate truth—is to be found in an acceptance of mystery, in allowing yourself to “know what you do not know” beyond the mechanics of explanation.

As Sophia says in The Shrine to the Unknown Gods (a reference to the Classical world, in the panoply of which such shrines had their place), not even an “existential Sherlock Holmes” (an apt description of Soph herself, by the way), not even the sharpest edge of human reason, can deliver to us, neatly wrapped and packaged, the most fundamental reality.

“(T)o leave a space/ Without a name” is to leave room for the power and possibility of Paul’s heart-fleet hare, for the transformative reason-beyond-reason which speaks for—and to—the soul.

How wonderful it is that Sophie, in her youthful wisdom, speaks to us still—and that, whenever we read her work, she always will.

The Shrine to the Unknown Gods

To believe is to know what you do not know,
To leave room for the existence of the blank
Beyond the back of your mind.

To believe is to suspend the elemental process of disbelief,
To momentarily cease to apply the human formula of understanding.

To believe is to acknowledge
That there are some things that will always be mysteries,
Too complex for the neatness of even an existential Sherlock Holmes.

To believe is to leave a space
Without a name.

By Sophia Nugent-Siegal © 2005