Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

I had helped myself with an infusion of hops, and I also took two valerian pills.

And then it occurred to me that in a way Big Foot’s death might be a good thing. It had freed him from the mess that was his life. And it had freed other living Creatures from him. 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.

I could sense his disgust as he watched my movements and cast (negative) judgment on my taste. He didn’t like my hairstyle, or my clothes, or my lack of subservience. He scrutinized my face with growing dislike.

Death is at the gates, I thought. But then death is always at our gates, at every hour of the day and Night, I told myself. For the best conversations are with yourself. At least there’s no risk of a misunderstanding.

There I lay, on the couch in the kitchen, trying to think about something else, but of course it was no use. I could feel an itching, pulsating energy seeping into my muscles—just a little more and it would blow my legs off from inside.

I didn’t yet know what I was going to do. Sometimes, when a Person feels Anger, everything seems simple and obvious. Anger puts things in order and shows you the world in a nutshell; Anger restores the gift of Clarity of Vision, which it’s hard to attain in any other state.

And so she went back to her Prison.

That’s what happens when a Person fails to consider the meaning of Words, and of Names in particular, but uses them blindly.

The death of someone you know is enough to deprive anyone of self-confidence.

So in fact death should please us. That’s what I was thinking as I sang, though in actual fact I have never believed in any personalized distribution of eternal Light. No Lord God is going to see to it, no celestial accountant. It would be hard for one individual to bear so much suffering, especially an omniscient one; in my view they would collapse under the burden of all that pain, unless equipped in advance with some form of defense mechanism, as Mankind is. Only a piece of machinery could possibly carry all the world’s pain. Only a machine, simple, effective and just. But if everything were to happen mechanically, our prayers wouldn’t be needed.

Without waiting for any sort of resolution, I went home,

I find the satellite pictures and the curvature of the Earth very moving. So is it true that we live on the surface of a sphere, exposed to the gaze of the planets, left in a great void, where after the Fall the light was smashed to smithereens and blown apart? It is true. We should remember that every day, for we do tend to forget. We believe we are free, and that God will forgive us. Personally I think otherwise. 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.

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

I’d like to lie here too, and take care of everything from here, forever.

Sometimes all it took was a disturbed Night’s sleep for everything to start tormenting me.

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.

I could see the beautiful geometric shapes of fields, strips and rectangles, each with a different texture, each with its own shade, sloping at different angles toward the rapid winter Dusk.

it all seemed carefully designed and positioned, perhaps by the very same hand that had been sketching.

But I also liked to cross it on purpose, deliberately stepping to and fro. A dozen times, or several dozen times. I’d amuse myself like that for half an hour—playing the game of crossing the border. It gave me pleasure, because I could remember the time when it wasn’t possible. I love crossing borders.

What if I found myself described in them in a way that I couldn’t fathom?

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.

At the end of my tour, I would take a final look around, and I should have felt happy that everything was there. After all, it could just as well not have been. 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.

my efforts are insignificant, they’d fit on a pinhead, just like my life as well. That should never be forgotten.

But the truth is that anyone who feels Anger, and does not take action, merely spreads the infection.

As there is an order of Births, why should there not be an order of Deaths?

One must keep one’s eyes and ears open, one must know how to match up the facts, see similarity where others see total difference, remember that certain events occur at various levels or, to put it another way, many incidents are aspects of the same, single occurrence. And that the world is a great big net, it is a whole, where no single thing exists separately; every scrap of the world, every last tiny piece, is bound up with the rest by a complex Cosmos of correspondences, hard for the ordinary mind to penetrate. That is how it works. Like a Japanese car.

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.

The motion of the planets is always hypnotic, beautiful, impossible to halt or hasten.

I must be very careful. Now I shall dare to say this: I’m not a good Astrologer, unfortunately. There’s a flaw in my character that obscures the image of the distribution of the planets. 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. But as the Fall is the beginning, can we possibly fall even lower?

In any case, I know the date of my own death, and that lets me feel free.