Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

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.

What a lack of imagination it is to have official first names and surnames. No one ever remembers them, they’re so divorced from the Person, and so banal that they don’t remind us of them at all. What’s more, each generation has its own trends, and suddenly everyone’s named Magdalena, Patryk, or—God

forbid—Janina.

the raindrops became long silver threads, like angel hair on a Christmas tree.

I had my Theory about interjections of this kind: every single Person has their own expression which he or she overuses. Or uses incorrectly. These words or phrases are the key to their intellect. Mr. “Apparently,” Mr. “Generally,” Mrs. “Probably,” Mr. “Fucking,” Mrs. “Don’t You Think?,” Mr. “As If.”

people just as suddenly start using one particular word or phrase.

Recently the word “generally” was fashionable, but now “actually” is out in front.

I couldn’t help thinking that someone who overuses the phrase “in truth” is sure to be a liar.

It occurred to me that if there really was a Good God, he should appear now in his true shape, as a Sheep, Cow or Stag, and thunder in a mighty tone, he should roar, and if he could not appear in person, he should send his vicars, his fiery archangels, to put an end to this terrible hypocrisy for once and for all. But of course no one intervened. He never intervenes.

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.