Psyche

Small Towels. What My Mother's Illness and Death Taught Me

Illustration by Przemysław Gawlas & Michał Kęskiewicz

Her faith was probably a bit like smoking: she'd have just one cigarette in the evening, standing under the awning and savoring that moment of relaxation before sleep — which I'm not sure ever actually came.

By Bartosz Sadulski

Two things leave me no peace and never will: tinnitus and grief after my mother's death. Both are hard to get used to. Probably because, as Joan Didion wrote: "Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be." I don't know what I expected, but I desperately didn't want to go through it.

Recurring grief after a mother's death

This year will mark fourteen years since her death — soon I'll be able to watch Czterdziestolatek ("The Forty-Year-Old") and say it's a film about me. The unprocessed grief still returns in waves. I started writing this piece in January, quite suddenly in the middle of the night, because I realized what I'd been doing: every time before I leave the house, I nervously peer through the kitchen window, hiding behind a large leaf of a monstera plant perched precariously on the fridge, to check whether my neighbor is smoking a cigarette.

We Are Neighbors of Fire: Anne Carson, an Uncompromising Writer

From Poznań to Suez: 70 Years Ago, Revolts and Crises Changed Poland and the World

The Poznań June and then the Polish October, the bloody uprising in Hungary and the war over the Suez Canal. How did 1956 change Poland, Europe, and the world? By Łukasz Kamiński The story of the turbulent year 1956 has to begin three years earlier, with Joseph Stalin's

Is This Already World War III? The New Conflicts Don't Look Like the Old Ones

Gideon Rachman: Global conflict is one of the main elements of world leaders' strategic thinking. Should we be ready for a new axis of evil? By Mateusz Mazzini and Gideon Rachman Mateusz Mazzini: You're about to publish a book on the risk of a new global war.

Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet: The Whirling Meaning of What we Read

Anne Carson, the Canadian poet and essayist, has for years been named among the leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature. It's no wonder Polish publishers are showing growing interest in her books. By Monika Ochędowska Written in the mid-1980s, Eros the Bittersweet is both Carson&