Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

I have a Theory about it. 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.

my efforts are insignificant, they’d fit on a pinhead, just like my life as well. That should never be forgotten.

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

Maybe it means that he who suffers has special access to God, by a side door, he is blessed, he embraces some sort of truth which without suffering would be hard to comprehend.

So in a way, the only person who’s healthy is one who suffers, however strange it might sound. I think that would be in harmony with the rest.

Perhaps tiny signs reveal this sort of cosmic event to us, but we don’t notice them either—someone has stepped on a twig lying on the path, a bottle of beer has cracked in the freezer when someone forgot to remove it in time, or two red fruits have fallen from a wild rose bush. How could we possibly understand it all?

“When one can’t speak, one should write,” she said. “It helps a lot,” she added, and fell silent. The wind grew stronger, and now we could see the trees outside swaying steadily to the rhythm of inaudible music, like the audience at a concert in an amphitheater.

It occurred to me that every unjustly inflicted death deserved public exposure. Even an Insect’s. A death that nobody noticed was twice as scandalous.

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.

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.