Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

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

The old method for dealing with bad dreams is to tell them aloud above the toilet bowl, and then flush them away.

For some time I shared my bed with a Catholic, and nothing good came of it.

For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist, the villages where they went on holiday, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafés and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it’s all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside it anymore. I have nowhere to return to. It’s like a state of imprisonment. The walls of the cell are the horizon of what I can see. Beyond them exists a world that’s alien to me and doesn’t belong to me. So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air. That’s