Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

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.

But if everything were to happen mechanically, our prayers wouldn’t be needed.

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.

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.

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

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.

Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There’s no instruction manual.

And perhaps, if he were still alive, seeing all this, Blake would say that there are some places in the Universe where the Fall has not occurred, the world has not turned upside down and Eden still exists. Here Mankind is not governed by the rules of reason, stupid and strict, but by the heart and intuition. The people do not indulge in idle chatter, parading what they know, but create remarkable things by applying their imagination. The state ceases to impose the shackles of daily oppression, but helps people to realize their hopes and dreams. And Man is not just a cog in the system, not just playing a role, but a free Creature. That’s what was passing through my mind, making my bedrest almost a pleasure. Sometimes I think that only the sick are truly healthy.

It’s a complete mystery that every challenge triggers vital forces within us.

It’s a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything. Like an impotent man who can’t experience pleasure himself, but will do all he can to ruin it for others.

Donald Trump

One for sorrow, two for joy.

I would see hundreds of them flying off to their night roost. I wonder if that means joy multiplied.

“In Dante’s Inferno Virgil says that as their punishment the astrologers had horribly twisted necks,” said Dizzy to wrap up my argument.

it occurred to me what a blessing it is to be ignorant.

I often wonder why we find some people attractive and not others. And I have a Theory about it, which is that there is such a thing as a perfectly harmonious shape to which our bodies instinctively aspire. We choose in others the features that seem to match this ideal. The aim of evolution is purely aesthetic—it’s not to do with adaptation at all. Evolution is about beauty, about achieving the most perfect form for each shape.

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.

“Are you religious?” I had to put the question. “Yes,” he replied proudly. “I’m an atheist.”

“We have a view of the world, but Animals have a sense of the world, do you see?”

“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 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.

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

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.

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?

he put all his affairs in order,