Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

fact that we’re built of elements of matter, while also being alien to it, separated from it. The feet—those are our plugs into the socket.

One Creature had devoured another, in the silence and stillness of the Night. Nobody had protested, no thunderbolt had struck. And yet Punishment had come upon the devil, though no one’s hand had guided death.

Anger makes the mind clear and incisive, able to see more. It sweeps up the other emotions and takes control of the body. Without a doubt Anger is the source of all wisdom, for Anger has the power to exceed any limits.

With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts.

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.

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

We sang like that for about an hour, the same thing over and over, until the words ceased to have any meaning, as if they were pebbles in the sea, tossed eternally by the waves, until they were round and as alike as two grains of sand.

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.

The world is a prison full of suffering, so constructed that in order to survive one must inflict pain on others.

Perverted monks, severed hands that murder people, coffins flushed out of graveyards by a flood. Evidently reading this sort of thing confirmed her in the conviction that we are not living in the worst of worlds, and taught her optimism.

That’s just what the color magazines do—just for a moment I’d wanted to be like them: they tell us what we’ve failed to do, where we’ve messed up, what we’ve neglected; ultimately they set us on ourselves, filling us with self-contempt.

It’s clear that the largest things are contained in the smallest. There can be no doubt about it. At this very moment, as I write, there’s a planetary configuration on this table, the entire Cosmos if you like: a thermometer, a coin, an aluminum spoon and a porcelain cup. A key, a cell phone, a piece of paper and a pen. And one of my gray hairs, whose atoms preserve the memory of the origins of life, of the cosmic Catastrophe that gave the world its beginning.

Boros’s 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?

And our Bats had settled in the tree and were singing. Their shrill, vibrating voices were jostling microscopic particles of mist, so the Night around us was softly starting to jingle, summoning all the Creatures to nocturnal worship.

“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. 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.

Omg!!! Cant help but to think about those stupid political with hunts in VN

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

Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.