Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

kept talking to myself, and realized that there was something wrong with me.

“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.”

The psyche is our defense system—it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us.

“I’m not a Catholic.” “It doesn’t matter. We’re all Catholics by culture, whether we like it or not. So please come.”

To tell the truth, I liked the concept of evil people who eliminate each other, in a chain.

The Gray Lady was right—people are only capable of understanding what they invent for themselves and feed on.

“Drive your plow over the bones of the dead,” I said to myself in the words of Blake; is that how it went?

It’s a good thing that God, if he exists, and even if he doesn’t, gives us a place where we can think in peace. Perhaps that’s the whole point of prayer—to think to yourself in peace, to want nothing, to ask for nothing, but simply to sort out your own mind. That should be enough.

How can God be listening to all the prayers in the entire world simultaneously? And what if they contradict each other? Does he have to listen to the prayers of all these bastards, devils and bad people? Do they pray? Are there places where this God is absent?

“They were my only loved ones. My family. My daughters.”

“You must pray,” he replied. “For them?” “For yourself. Animals don’t have souls, they’re not immortal. They shall not know salvation. Please pray for yourself.”

Anger always leaves a large void behind it, into which a flood of sorrow pours instantly, and keeps on flowing like a great river, without beginning or end. My tears came; once again their sources were replenished.

“But I don’t want us to reject them, as you put it. It’s just that I refuse to let anyone encourage children to do evil things or teach them hypocrisy. Glorifying killing is evil. It’s as simple as that.”

I had everything I needed in the Samurai. Falling before my eyes, the Twilight was in my favor. It always favors people like me.

But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right?

But what I saw in the corner of the picture almost caused me to faint, and everything went dark before my eyes. You didn’t notice, Oddball, you were occupied with Big Foot’s dead body, you were saying something while I was fighting my nausea. Who could have failed to recognize that white fur and those black patches? In the corner of the picture lay three dead Dogs, neatly laid out, like trophies. One of them was unfamiliar to me. The other two were my Little Girls.

To tell the truth, I have never understood the difference between “poaching” and “hunting.” Both words mean killing. The former in a covert, illegal way, the latter openly, within the full majesty of the law.

Old girls like me always go about with plastic bags, don’t they?

Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us. Why should I yield to their power and let them tell me what to think?