Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

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. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding.

anyone who feels Anger, and does not take action, merely spreads the infection.

There are various magazines and newspapers that I sometimes buy, but reading them usually gives me an unspecified sense of guilt. A feeling that there’s something I haven’t done, something I’ve forgotten, that I’m not up to the demands of the task, that in some essential way I’m lagging behind the rest.

There are some people at whom one only has to glance for one’s throat to tighten and one’s eyes to fill with tears of emotion. These people make one feel as if a stronger memory of our former innocence remains in them, as if they were a freak of nature, not entirely battered by the Fall. Perhaps they are messengers, like the servants who find a lost prince who’s unaware of his origins, show him the robe that he wore in his native country, and remind him how to return home.

Other people’s life stories are not a topic for debate. One should hear them out, and reciprocate in the same coin.

Life is like an extremely demanding testing ground. From now on everything you do will count, every thought and every deed, but not for you to be punished or rewarded afterward, but because it is they that build your world. This is how the machine works. As

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.

each one deep in thought, mentally reviewing what has happened lately and imagining what’s going to happen soon. Like this, they monitor their own lives. Just like everyone else, I would sit in a pew and sink into a sort of semiconscious state. My thoughts would move idly, as if coming from outside me, from other people’s heads, or maybe from the heads of the wooden angels positioned nearby. Every time, something new occurred to me, something different from what I would have thought at home. In this way the church is a good place.

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.

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 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.

Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter