Arthur C. Clarke had one answer. “The newspapers of Utopia . . . would be terribly dull,” he wrote in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, who, like so many of her Eastern European compatriots, lived through the ravages of two dystopian utopias, hints at some deeper possibilities. In her poem “Utopia,” she writes of an “Island where all becomes clear,” where “Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley,” and where “The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple, / sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.” And yet:

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,

and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches

turn without exception to the sea.

 

As if all you can do here is leave

and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

 

Into unfathomable life.