Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

In spring the skiers are replaced by allergy sufferers, and the picture takes on color. Soft lines establish the danger zones. Where there is red, nature’s attack is the fiercest. All winter it has been dormant, waiting to assail Mankind’s immune system, fragile as filigree. One day it will get rid of us entirely in this way.

The angels, if they really do exist, must be splitting their sides laughing at us. Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There’s no instruction manual.

I am taking the liberty of enclosing both Horoscopes, in the expectation that the police Astrologer will consult them, and then support my Hypothesis.

“The traditional ancient Astrology of Ptolemy tells us it’s down to Saturn. In its discordant aspects Saturn has the power to make people mean-spirited, spiteful, solitary and plaintive. They’re malicious, cowardly, shameless and sullen, they never stop scheming, they speak evil, and they don’t take care of their bodies. They endlessly want more than they have, and nothing ever pleases them.

It’s strange how the Night erases all colors, as if it didn’t give a damn about such worldly extravagance.

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?

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