Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

Devilish creatures are always recognized by their feet – they stamp the earth with a different seal.

A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate Predicts the ruin of the State.

I believe each of us sees the other Person in our own way, so we should give them the name we consider suitable and fitting.

The prison is not outside, but inside each of us. Perhaps we simply don’t know how to live without it.

In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.

They really were the people from the well – they’d fallen into it long ago and had now arranged their lives at the bottom of it, thinking the well was the entire world.

I squint, as a way of blurring their shape and making them disappear. I only do it because I cannot bear their presence. But the truth is that anyone who feels Anger, and does not take action, merely spreads the infection. So says our Blake.

them have lost their vigilance. I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism – it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components – the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means ‘the dropping of petals’. The world has dropped its petals.

I see everything as if in a dark mirror, as if through smoked glass. I view the world in the same way as others look at the Sun in eclipse.

Sometimes it’s as if I’m composed of nothing but symptoms of illness, I am a phantom built out of pain.

The old method for dealing with bad dreams is to tell them aloud above the toilet bowl, and then flush them away.

I could see them ossifying as they inevitably entered adolescence, which gradually forced them to be hooked on being the same as others. In a few cases there was a bit of an inner struggle as they wrestled with this new state of being, but almost all of them ended up capitulating.

Spring is just a short interlude, after which the mighty armies of death advance; they’re already besieging the city walls. We live in a state of siege. If one takes a close look at each fragment of a moment, one might choke with terror. Within our bodies disintegration inexorably advances; soon we shall fall sick and die. Our loved ones will leave us, the memory of them will dissolve in the tumult; nothing will remain. Just a few clothes in the wardrobe and someone in a photograph, no longer recognized. The most precious memories will dissipate. Everything will sink into darkness and vanish.

‘Après nous le déluge,’

For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there.

The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist, the villages where they went on holiday, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafés and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it’s all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside it any more. I have nowhere to return to. It’s like a state of imprisonment. The walls of the cell are the horizon of what I can see. Beyond them exists a world that’s alien to me and doesn’t belong to me.

And it was a good thing he had his Ailments. Being healthy is an insecure state and does not bode well. It’s better to be ill in a quiet way, then at least we know what we’re going to die of.