Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

‘Don’t you have a torch?’ he asked. Of course I had one, but I wouldn’t be able to tell where it was until morning, in the daylight. It’s a feature of torches that they’re only visible in the daytime.

Oh yes, suddenly I realized what a good thing death can be, how just and fair, like a disinfectant, or a vacuum cleaner. I admit that’s what I thought, and that’s what I still think now.

To my mind, Death should be followed by the annihilation of matter. That would be the best solution for the body. Like this, annihilated bodies would go straight back into the black holes whence they came. The Souls would travel at the speed of light into the light. If such a thing as the Soul exists.

What a joy it is in life when you happen to have a clean, warm kitchen. It has never happened to me. I have never been good at keeping order around me. Too bad – I’m reconciled to it by now.

Once we have reached a certain age, it’s hard to be reconciled to the fact that people are always going to be impatient with us. In the past, I was never aware of the existence and meaning of gestures such as rapidly giving assent, avoiding eye contact, and repeating ‘yes, yes, yes’ like clockwork. Or checking the time, or rubbing one’s nose – these days I fully understand this entire performance for expressing the simple phrase: ‘Give me a break, you old bag.’

For the best conversations are with yourself. At least there’s no risk of a misunderstanding.

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

Finally, transformed into tiny quivering photons, each of our deeds will set off into Outer Space, where the planets will keep watching it like a film until the end of the world.

I find this division of people into three groups – skiers, allergy sufferers and drivers – very convincing. It is a good, straightforward typology. Skiers are hedonists. They are carried down the slopes. Whereas drivers prefer to take their fate in their hands, although their spines often suffer as a result; we all know life is hard. Whereas the allergy sufferers are always at war. I must surely be an allergy sufferer.

It is at Dusk that the most interesting things occur, for that is when simple differences fade away. I could live in everlasting Dusk.

As I gazed at the black-and-white landscape of the Plateau I realized that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. It lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence.

There could have been nothing but grass here – large clumps of wind-lashed steppe grass and the rosettes of thistles. That’s what it could have been like. Or there could have been nothing at all – a total void in outer space. But perhaps that would have been the best option for all concerned.

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 look at them through my fear, and despite the semblance of cheerfulness that people naively and ingenuously ascribe to me, 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. Thus I see the Earth in eclipse. I see us moving about blindly in eternal Gloom, like May bugs trapped in a box by a cruel child. It’s easy to harm and injure us, to smash up our intricately assembled, bizarre existence. I interpret everything as abnormal, terrible and threatening. I see nothing but Catastrophes.

‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ he repeated mechanically, which threw me right off balance. Obviously no god was going to come and put things to rights.

I was angry with her, for she had died a long time ago, and that’s not how long-gone mothers should behave.

If our cerebellum were connected to our brain, we would possess full knowledge of our own anatomy, of what was happening inside our bodies. Oh, we’d say to ourselves, the level of potassium in my blood has fallen. My third cervical vertebra is feeling tension. My blood pressure is low today, I must move about, and yesterday’s egg mayonnaise has sent my cholesterol level too high, so I must watch what I eat today.

We have this body of ours, a troublesome piece of luggage, we don’t really know anything about it and we need all sorts of Tools to find out about its most natural processes. Isn’t it scandalous that last time a doctor wanted to check what was happening in my stomach he made me have a gastroscopy? I had to swallow a thick tube, and it took a camera to reveal the inside of my stomach to us. The only coarse and primitive Tool gifted us for consolation is pain.

Luckily my sleep cycle was changing again; I’d nod off at dawn and wake in the afternoon, which may have been a natural defence against the daylight, against the day in general and everything that belonged to it.

That’s what I dislike most of all in people – cold irony. It’s a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything.

Sorrow, I felt great sorrow, an endless sense of mourning for every dead Animal. One period of grief is followed by another, so I am in constant mourning. This is my natural state.

‘In fact Man has a great responsibility towards wild Animals – to help them to live their lives, and it’s his duty towards domesticated Animals to return their love and affection, for they give us far more than they receive from us.

Each man was my brother and each woman my sister. We were so very much alike. So fragile, impermanent, and easily destroyed. We trustingly went to and fro beneath the sky, which had nothing good in store for us.

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.

The truth is I had a lot in common with them – I too saw the world in other spheres, upside down. I too preferred the Dusk. I wasn’t suited to living in the Sunlight.

I don’t like those high, powerful cars, made with war in mind, rather than walks in the lap of nature. Their large wheels churn up the ruts in the dirt roads and damage the footpaths. Their mighty engines make a lot of noise and produce exhaust fumes. I am convinced that their owners have small dicks and compensate for this deficiency by having large cars.

Boros’ presence reminded me what it’s like to live with someone. And how very awkward it is. How much it diverts you from your own thoughts and distracts you. How another Person starts to irritate you without actually doing anything annoying, but simply by being there. Each morning when he went off to the forest, I blessed my glorious solitude. How do people manage to spend decades living together in a small space? I wondered. How can they possibly sleep in the same bed together, breathing on and jostling each other accidentally in their sleep?

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. So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air.

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.

Everything will pass. The wise Man knows this from the start, and has no regrets.

‘You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.’

my belief that the human psyche evolved in order to defend us against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defence system – it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.

And how will I cope? After all, I’m like them too. My life’s harvest is not the building material for anything, neither in my time, now, or in any other, never. But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.